


The Counterfeits

by ninety6tears



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Detectives, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Case Fic, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-05
Updated: 2011-11-06
Packaged: 2017-10-25 18:01:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 83,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/273162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninety6tears/pseuds/ninety6tears
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Several months after a disastrous investigation, Detective Jim Kirk has transferred out of New Dublin's murder squad and thinks he's done being anywhere near homicide. But just when he's settling into a different job, a dead body shows up with a stolen identity and a very familiar face. Reluctantly reunited with his old boss Christopher Pike, Kirk is asked to work a bizarre undercover operation in order to not only find out who killed the victim, but who created him. (Fusion based on Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series - mainly The Likeness w/ some elements from In The Woods.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure how much this is needed but I'm adding a note to clarify that when "UCD" is mentioned in this story, it's supposed to stand for Undercover Division. I realized this could be confusing because it more commonly abbreviates University College Dublin, which happens to be referred to pretty often in _The Likeness_ because Detective Maddox first went undercover posing as a UCD student.
> 
> The lovely cover art is by **mal_feasant** @ Livejournal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a saying that gets passed around with the tone of old wives' tales, that everyone in New Dublin has a secret. Aside from a load of henpecky mantras about where to always bring a raincoat, it's really the only saying we have.

New Dublin was born a couple generations before me, during the colonization boom of what some would say was the most naive phase of Terran wanderlust. If you've ever been to the actual Ireland, you know it's one of the most well-preserved areas on Earth, all natural pastoral ease that goes beyond pretty and "quaint" into something that demands a certain respect from anyone who visits it. I guess it was the mild threat of the country becoming too trendily populated that led someone to decide to build up a brand new Dublin on some unclaimed region of a planet called Niori in the Orion sector. Dublin itself as opposed to Ireland's more rural areas has been thoroughly contemporary for a very long time, so I imagine the little cottage villas built to match the green fields and wooded resorts were modeled after a much older version of the capital than anyone alive even remembers.

There was no forethought made of the fact that Niori is located perfectly to be a back door to the most violent areas of Orion itself, and immigration came in gradual flashes of debris from one planet to the next, some people seeking various types of refuge and others trying to lay claim on what was initially perceived as a growing economic land mine. About twenty years after New Dublin's genesis, this assumption had proved to start holding a lot of water: Terra had to evaluate again and again that they couldn't be expected to offer frequent service to a planet that had started out as nothing much more than a vacation spot, and the residents were forced to set up actual interplanetary commerce so that the resources wouldn't dry up, leaving it more or less orphaned and independent.

The city is the only one I have ever seen that gets bigger and noisier from the inside-out rather than stretching thin at the edges. Everything at the center is your idyllic but sinister snap of cold rain in late summer, trees that reach to the corner of your eye and even occasional honest-to-god farmlands. I've never seen a sheep, but we don't pay import prices on wool, so I'd have to get back to you on that. These areas are still popular for all kinds of recreation businesses, but a lot of the visiting families don't bother venturing out from the middle to the loud ring of far more populated and also more crime-filled danger zones. A tourist couple I chatted with at a diner said they were on their way through the scenic route to the farther vessel station, and I'd said, "Trust me, there's nothing to see."

Residents of ND are funny things. Unless you have a dumb idea of fun, there isn't much you can get from living in New Dublin that you can't get somewhere else, but once you come here it's hard to leave, and I've never known anyone who can easily explain why. The downsides have no charm to compensate, but there is a certain formidable personality to the city, like you think it would laugh at you on your way out the door if you didn't at least stick around long enough to see what it has to show you. That's the best I've come up with to describe it: It's got something waiting for everybody.

I have seen and heard of the most wickedly uncanny things here, and there are times when I think we do have our secrets like dark little gems but that they aren't living inside of us. The city has them clutched somewhere, and one day we come across some loose stone or a wobble in the floorboard or the noise of hollowness under something hard, and in one cool overturning moment, she shows us ourselves. I've never been superstitious but I suppose I'm a man of instinct, and on top of that I am a detective, so I tend to think there's something to this.

As for what type of detective, there were times when I've been asked this and only been able to smartly reply, "A good one." When I was still a patrol cop, I had no specific ambitions laid out besides working up to something that didn't require wearing a uniform. This was until I broke into the big leagues much sooner than seeming quite the right age, the whole thing resulting from a call for an undercover operation that I was basically dared to submit my records for despite the fact that there was probably no way I would be considered (my buddies at the time had a strange idea of partying, and I know I was actually drunk when I submitted the application).

It was all the more surreal that I actually got called in for an interview when I heard the operation had been passed over to Christopher Pike's supervision. I hadn't met him but I knew that people took him very seriously, and while you'd think I would've started sweating up some plan about how I should try to sell myself the best I could, I didn't realize how much I truly wanted the job until three minutes into the interview. I actually had the nerve to tell him as much. But after less than half an hour he'd already decided I had something he needed and told me that we would start going through the motions until he started to worry I couldn't handle what was coming and then thank me for the time. He never worried, though, and less than a month later I was mediating drug sellers downtown. I made it through three months of that without fucking up and then Chris pulled me so he could put me into a higher job infiltrating a trade gang that had connections through the entire sector and was involved in everything from illegal weaponry to person trafficking.

Altogether I worked in undercover for just under two years before deciding to transfer, and my reason for wanting to leave is so simple most people don't believe it.

You might be surprised how much acting is involved in operations; when I was on the Murder Squad later on I liked how there was an almost sadistic craft to knowing what to do in an interview room. You have to be able to make somebody believe that you'd love to go out and have a beer with them in different circumstances, or that you're one second away from punching their lights out—whatever gets you a confession. But in Undercover I found myself confronted with an instinct that didn't hold me back from doing the job, but still made me realize I had to get out: I don't like to lie. Maybe it was naive of me not to be prepared for how many lies you have to tell to a lot of good people on the way to getting the truth from just a few bad ones, but once you've been inserted into a person's life, once you've eaten _hors d'oeuvres_ off their kitchen tables and gotten drunk with them and brought flowers to their wives to apologize for the wine stain on the carpet, it all starts to feel a bit too cannibalistic.

This didn't mean I was bad at it; I was never one of the idiots who forgot that for every second of anything from a business deal to a poker game you're really standing in an iron maiden and that anyone around might not hesitate to shoot you in the nuts if you say something he doesn't like. But for me, one level of what was going on was no more real than the other. When I caught myself realizing I'd never made any friends I knew as well as I knew the fuck-ups I was trying to get evidence on, I figured there wasn't much longer I could take the job.

Once an exit opened up, my settling into doing homicide after that for over a couple years felt like a fatefully smooth transition. Later on I remember my mom rolling her eyes with familiar exasperation when I told her with some vague explanation that I was switching divisions yet again, but it was different with Murder. I loved that job and I didn't want to leave, but I had to, after Operation 86 happened.

On the page, there wasn't anything uniquely tragic about the case: A married couple showed up slaughtered in one of the resort forests, leaving behind a couple girls and an ambitious architecture collaboration that would never be finished. In my lowest moods I find myself almost wishing we'd never gotten farther than the four-week snag when it looked like our leads were all drying up. In the end, we solved it, but we didn't resolve it. The guy who pulled the trigger got put away, but there were other strings attached, the deeper evil apparent to us but neatly arranged just far enough outside of admissibility to cut right free.

I'm sure I get my fair share of snide remarks about how I got spooked off the squad because it was nothing so traumatizing as a shoot-out or another cop getting killed, but that case shook things out of me I never thought I could lose track of, and when they were gone, I was too far beat to even feel like I wanted them back. For lack of a better idea I transferred onto the Domestic Violence unit where I've been training this sharp and earnest rookie from Russia, making next to no friends, and generally trying not to become a tragic cliché.

I want to warn you right off the bat that just because I am a cop, that doesn't make me the good guy in this story. If there is even one singular bad guy in the whole mess, it isn't me either, but don't get ahead of yourself and think that all of this is necessarily mine to tell.

In my shame and in my defense, this is what I've got: I did a lot of lying and it's impossible to say what could make up for it or if I did, but I tried. And I loved.

 

 

The night that all of this got started I was at the police department's gym. It was the end of the week, so the place was mostly filled with the veteran shut-ins as well as a couple younger officers who were probably making a point of not going out for a drink after a stressful week. I fell somewhere between the second category and having nothing better to do.

I was done and heading to the shower when I saw that my personal comm was flashing blue from the side pocket of my bag; I was making a face at seeing I'd been commed no less than nine times since I'd left my stuff in the locker and didn't have a chance to check the IDs before it was already chirping a tenth call. I picked up. "Kirk."

At the end of the aisle two officers came by laughing and I would've had a hard time hearing, but there was mostly vague static after what I thought was the sound of someone's breath hitching. Just that gasp and no reply.

" _Hello_?" I tried.

The call ended. Whatever was so important, it must have been someone with a wrong number. My other hand was busy getting out my change of clothes, and I ended up tossing the communicator aside to deal with it later if they called back again, walked off to the showers.

The damn thing was beeping again when I came back, and I answered impatiently, "Yes? Hello?"

" _Jim_ , finally!"

"Bones," I recognized. "What's up?"

"Hey, are you okay?"

"Why would I not be okay?" I'd heard an edge to his voice and instantly got worried. "What's wrong?"

"It's just..." Bones took a second, like he was almost interrupted by something. "Dammit, man, I don't know where to begin. Look, I just got called out here to look at a body..."

I went still. Bones was a very good friend of mine, but our list of mutual acquaintances was a pretty short one. I tried to work my mouth into asking who it was, but all that came out was a limp little curse.

"Oh—No, it's not like that, it's not anyone we know."

My hand scraped up into my hair. "Christ, Bones."

"Sorry. At least, I don't _think_ it is..."

" _What_?"

"Listen...Wait, hold on a second."

I rolled my eyes as I could tell Bones was tilting his mobile comm, listening to someone who was talking a mile a minute; I was boredly trying to profile the type of crime scene from the atmosphere of the exchange. Off-home homicide was my hunch. After almost a minute of this I started impatiently tapping my foot.

"Hey, aren't you Kirk?" This came from a young officer I saw around the gym a lot but had never met in the field; he was hesitating at the door of the locker room and had apparently failed to note that I was on the comm, or didn't care about being polite. "Weren't you one of the guys on that case, uh, the March couple?"

I shook my head. "Nope."

"Didn't you used to be Murder? I swore that was you." He shrugged and then crassly shared, "Heard your partner got a bit of a hard-on for a suspect and screwed up big time."

"You're thinking of somebody else, pal," I said with just the right amount of blatantly fake cheeriness that meant he needed to back the fuck off. I reached to grab a cigarette out of the case in his hand without asking as I walked by, beating him out of the doorway.

Bones was back on and saying, "Hey. I think you should come out here and get a look at this."

"Why? Man, what the hell is going on? You need me to look at the _body_? Who's handling the investigation?"

"Just—" An interruption; that other voice again, and Bones grumbling something at it before he got back on. "I think you should come out here. We're across from Green Station, between the museum and that little diner, it's uh—"

"Peggy's. I know where it is. Bones?"

"What?"

"This better be good."

 

 

My only personal vehicle is a vintage-styled motorcycle that's long and sleek and just barely big enough to handle two people. It winds nicely in and out of traffic, but with the prevalence of rain in this city I'm the only cop I know who owns one. For that there have been some half-assed attempts to slap a nickname on me related to my mode of transportation, but nothing ever stuck.

I was pulling the bike up close to Peggy's and at first it didn't smack of crime scene at all; but then I saw farther down between the buildings. The wide alley was cleared and lined with crime scene tape, and under one of the shadowing awnings of the old library I saw the deliberating gaggle, Bones' profile noticeable among them.

After lazily slinging my helmet over my handle and walking up, I spotted the figure leaning against a lamppost who seemed to be talking loudly into a mobile. He was just then hanging up, and when he turned, noticed me and nodded in my direction, I slowly fell into an astonished grin.

"Christopher fuckin' Pike," I exclaimed. "The hell are you doing here?"

"There's that son of a bitch," he announced when he saw me, then added for the sake of reminiscence, "James T. Kirk, the great fake drug pusher...What's this I'm hearing about you being in DV?"

It had been a year or more since I'd heard from Pike. He had more than enough skills and experience to play my favorite game of subdivision musical chairs, but I highly doubted he'd ever want to transfer out of UCD, and that gave me a bad feeling. Instead of answering his question, I was dropping my voice low and stepping in close enough to say, "Jesus, it wasn't one of your guys...?"

That put Chris right into a strange expression, like I'd said something that was almost funny. Even though I couldn't decipher that, it made me a bit relieved. I was expecting him to get half-offended and correct me by pointing out that informants don't end up dead under his watch, thank you very much, but he wouldn't have had a chance before Bones came rushing over, clapping an arm over my shoulders like he hadn't seen me in months. Something about the look of him got me uneasy again.

"Seriously," I said, my brows furrowing. "Are you alright?"

"Ah, hell," Bones replied as if to mean he was just fine, but there was something too nervous in how he was looking at me that set me on edge.

"Okay." I couldn't help sounding a little irritable. "What the hell's going on?"

Chris said, "Trust me, you really just need to see for yourself. Put your hood up for me, will you?"

I was moving to do it without really thinking, then patiently mumbling, "What the fuck, Chris?"

It made me flinch in surprise when he reached and scrubbed it farther down almost over my eyes, only saying, "It'll save us time."

"Well, you know how I feel about wasting time," I said blandly, then looked quickly over to mouth, _What the fuck?_ at Bones, who gave me nothing, just shaking his head in an overwhelmed way and seeming to agree that Chris had a point about something.

I was working uneasily back to my initial suspicions about this, and it was worse now with Chris apparently thinking I shouldn't be identified at the scene. Some of these jobs went on for years, and I probably knew a couple cops who were still under, but I didn't want to work up my nerves by going through any actual lists or faces.

The techs let me under the tape without bothering to check for ID after recognizing Chris. The forensics team floated away from the point at the sight of us too, and once they were pretty far away, Chris motioned that I could take off the hood.

There was very little light in the alley; I suspected they'd deliberately kept it that way to dampen down the curious attention of any bystanders. Everything had the watery profile formed by moonlight bouncing off puddles, deceivingly peaceful like something out of a movie with a couple kissing under an umbrella. But my eyes were drawn right into the distant but nearing blot that was there like a line ripped out of a mural: the body.

It was lying not quite perpendicular to the buildings, but the form seemed to slice lightning all the way across the gravel from one wall to the other. The head was looking away from us but I immediately distinguished it as probably male: broad-shouldered with short light hair that did a little lick in the wind like a moth hopping against a lamp. I didn't realize until I was lagging slightly behind Bones and Pike's more impatient paces that I'd slowed a little. It made me pick it up with irritated anxiety; I was done with the suspense and wanted to just get this over with, no matter how ugly it was going to be.

I was apparently still used to thinking like a homicide investigator, because the first thing I assessed was the damage, the way he was lying. His jacket was of a light gray and it was easy to quickly notice the tangled stain of blood smack in the middle of the torso: a stabbing, it looked like. (I wouldn't have ruled out a gang-related attack—phasers are standard technology for law enforcement or anyone who can legally own one, but while archaic gun models are easier to get in the black market, sometimes small-time murder is still done more old-school than that.) The position was sort of twisted like a thrown rag—bodies go like that sometimes when the victim is still struggling but too shocked to really move their legs—and I would have to move around to look at the upper torso and face. His left arm was mostly jammed behind his back, but on the other side the position was almost an imitation of a man relaxed on his bed: the hand rested on the ground and his head tucked sort of boyishly right behind it.

Just when I stepped around to look at the body head-on, there was a second when I got impatient again. I was close to petulantly remarking that I didn't know what the hell I was supposed to be looking for. And then Chris got out his flashlight and flicked it on, directing the beam right up over the head.

Think of every cliché in the book: I was slammed headlong into every disembodying, this-isn't-real feeling you can imagine. I very literally thought that I was about to wake up and head into the shower shaking my head out of this, rolling my eyes at the supposed symbolic implications. I was gripped at the shoulder by a cold hand insisting that I was not standing where I was standing, that I was about to simply tremble away in the wind, because I was dead.

He was me. He did not just look like me: He was, in every single angle and pigment, me. He had the length and color and visible texture of my hair, my thick long brows. My big mouth, the stretched point of my jawline. The body, now that I was really looking, was a carbon copy of my bone structure. He even looked like he'd weigh just the same. I felt a nauseated tingle that rang through my teeth, and I found myself senselessly and immediately grateful that the eyes were closed.

At some point Bones had come up next to me; I don't know if I looked like I needed an arm to keep from falling over, but his hand went carefully to my shoulder and I was kind of jolted back into thinking properly, turning my face to look at him and Chris. Bones was shaking his head, looking like he'd been through being stunned but was amazed by it all over again.

"They say everybody's got a twin somewhere," he muttered. "But _this_...No way. It couldn't be a cousin of yours or anything?"

I shook my head, barking out a strange-sounding laugh.

Chris added, "And we know you can't be adopted or..."

I saw Bones' expression as he realized what Chris meant: The circumstances of my birth got a lot of public attention and even though it's not a story I really enjoy telling, most people who get to know me hear it as some point in time. The short version is that I chose a hold-up at a little corner store as a fine time to start getting born, and my mom went into labor right next to the ice cream freezer. My father, in the midst of attempting to explain all the panic to a nervous half-drunk crook, was shot and killed just before the law got there, and I was born just a couple hours later to a newly grieving mom.

You would probably assume this had some seriously devastating effects of long-term emotional complication, and I don't really have any other upbringing to compare it to, but I think we did about as alright as a family as we could have after that. My mom was of course deeply sad at times, but in ways that I could only realize when looking back much later were about my dad. I didn't think about the vague ghost of my father all that much, though it did occur to me when I was eleven to suggest that we should start celebrating my birthday a few days early. I think the most important hold his death had on me didn't come until pretty late in my life, because—and it has taken me years to even admit this—it was a big part of the reason I became a cop.

In any case, even if the possibility of my mother pulling a fast one on me and me apparently having some separated sibling out there wasn't almost humorously absurd, it's pretty obvious that the news at the time would have sensationalized the whole thing twofold if my mom had bravely delivered more than one baby that day.

"Please," I flatly implored, "please tell me no one thought to contact my mother."

"Somebody definitely might have." Chris was holding up something I'd only just now realized he'd had: something enclosed in evidence plastic. "But then they started searching the body, and things got weird."

I slowly reached and took it from him. It was an ID badge, the old laminated kind people often have at college. I stirred back into that surreal feeling just from looking at the mug photo, blinking at it for a second.

And then I read the name: William Kenley.

For a second I thought that I was going to laugh, like I figured it was a joke, but Chris wouldn't joke about this. I looked straight at him, my mind completely wiped of anything for a second before I decidedly said, "Bullshit."

I could tell that Bones had no idea what was up; he had an expression like he'd been impatiently trying to wrangle it out of Chris long before I'd gotten here. "What?" he snapped at me. "What's the big deal?"

I was pacing anxiously around now, one hand going through my hair. I opened my mouth and shut it one time, not knowing where to start, before I pointed to the body and stammered out to Bones, "Will Kenley does not exist."

Years ago Pike and I had pulled him out of the air, we'd made him up, for my second undercover job. We had outlined his entire life, his family, his relationships, his reason for coming to New Dublin, all in the course of a long afternoon over half a dozen cups of coffee. Every seam of his personality had been tailored for the setting, which needed somebody just stupid enough to get up to their knees in a drug scandal but protective of his own wits, the type pushers valued as fresh dealing meat because they could at least trust he wasn't going to sample the goods. We enjoyed the irony of Will Kenley's simple-boy allure almost with an over-indulgence; he was like a kid that's so stupid even his parents will affectionately admit it.

I got so into creating Will, probably a hell of a lot more than I'd needed to. I didn't stop at being instrumental because I'd felt he needed to be as real to me as he was to anyone else. I invented all kinds of secrets for him, going so far as to download types of pornography that I myself would never enjoy and which I hoped, for Will's sake, no one else would ever find. I put _subtext_ into this person; I was often curious as to whether any of his friends picked up on the fact that his relationship with his siblings wasn't as great as he claimed, or that he tipped food service better when he was in a foul mood than he did when he was having a good day. I got laid three times as often as I usually did when I was Will Kenley, and got slapped or punched in the mouth ten times as often. Will was made to be the last person you'd expect because he was far from charismatic, he was crude but likable, and he thought he could get away with just about anything. You might understand why, after I looked at the ID, there was a blank and stupid split second in which I understood that he had finally gone and done something dumb enough to get his ass killed.

I wanted to smirk when I realized the probable reason Chris had come here in the first place. Alias names will often get flagged so that if you even end up in the emergency room your boss is the first person anyone calls. Out of either untidiness or some misplaced idea of nostalgia, Will had apparently never gotten shelved off of Pike's list.

I was still explaining some of the short version of all this while Chris went off to hand the ID back to whoever was handling hard evidence and had stopped to ask a favor from some other assistant, when I saw Bones' eyes shifting to the side and sensed that he'd been waiting until he could get me alone.

"Jim, uh." Bones scratched at his stubble and said, "There's something I should tell you."

"Hmm?"

"I don't know if you've noticed, but they're going to have to call somebody else in from Murder." He almost seemed like he was stalling. "The thing is, when they found the body...Spock was one of the guys who got called out here."

I let out a stiff quick sigh, waiting a second for something to ebb away. After a moment I asked, "He's already back on the squad?"

Bones just stood staring at me for a few seconds. " _That's_ the first thing you have to say?"

"I mean, I figured he was off suspension by now, but after he—"

"Are you not listening to what I'm telling you? They knew it probably couldn't be you by the time I got here, cause there was the ID, and Joey Kelly swearing he'd just seen you less than an hour before. But Spock was one of the first people who even saw the body...I heard it wasn't pretty."

"Okay," I said, flat and impatient. I looked up to the sky and paced an anxious step back, being hit with the realization as I suddenly remembered earlier when I was at the gym: That first call I'd picked up on hadn't been Bones.

"Okay," Bones bitterly parroted. "It's just...hell, I figured if there was ever a time to finally just try giving him a _call_ or something—"

"What _for_?" I snapped, suddenly almost wanting to shout. "Spock has got fuck-all to say to me, and I've got even less to say to him. Where is this even coming from? You've been just as pissed off at him for—"

"Jim." Bones had this deeply grave expression that was really starting to tick me off, talking as if I hadn't already grasped what he was saying. He emphasized, "He thought it was you."

"Change the subject," I said. "Now."

Chris saved me either way, coming up quickly behind me and making me mumble, " _Ow_ " at the sharp prick at my scalp. I turned to see him wearing a latex glove and handing off a sample of my hair to one of the handlers, and caught on fast. Taking genetic samples through the whole lab routine was still a thing of the past here until they had to create some law that made it so that only a verified specialist could pronounce things a match, and you need to be science or medical to even have DNA analyzers on your forensic tricorders anymore. It makes some sense from a reliability standpoint, but the running joke is that the law is only around to create a couple jobs.

"They're running a clone check? Come on. He's my age."

"It's procedure, apparently," Chris said with a shrug. "Listen, you're welcome to dally off home, but I might have something to talk to you about later. Doctor McCoy, if you don't mind, I may need you for a couple more things. You will still be doing the autopsy?..."

Bones nodded, after a hesitation. Then he was looking puzzled, probably about the same thing I couldn't figure out.

"What, did they hand you the investigation?" I asked. "How is that even—?"

"We'll talk later." Chris gave a hard pat to the side of my shoulder. "Go get a nap or something if you need it; I could be pretty late."

I was happy to leave, so I just gave Bones a shrug, returning the slightly apologetic look he gave me, and zipped up my jacket. The body was still only some yards away, but I didn't give it so much as a backward glance. I wanted to get away from it as fast as possible.

Sometimes I think about the hugeness of New Dublin, the churning and ever-changing traffic of two different lives that meant that in all likelihood it had to take one of us dying for either to sit still long enough for the other to find him. I've always felt with an odd certainty that that was the only way we could have ever met, as if approaching him head-on would have been like managing to kiss my own elbow or squeeze myself into some parallel dimension. I was heavily steeped in the gloomy narcissism that accompanies anything like grief, and there was a part of me that believed at first that Will only existed because of what he could do to me.

 

 

I didn't get any sleep while I waited on Pike; I got home and got into the one pack of cigarettes I had lying around, put on some documentary just for background noise, and smoked about half a dozen.

Just when I was almost ready to give up on him, Chris came by. Bones walked in right behind him, impressively looking even a little more harried than he had earlier. Something new had to have come up.

Before either said anything I was ahead of them, heading over to the bar for a good cognac I wasn't likely to have a better occasion for. There was some decorative conversation and catching-up that was awkwardly stilted a bit by everyone pretty much wanting to get to the point, but eventually Chris made another crack about me working on Domestic Violence now, and I had to give him a warning smirk.

"Seriously, though," Chris, right after nodding thanks for the cognac, demanded, "what the hell are you doing working a job like that?"

I squinted defensively. "What's so wrong with DV? It's—"

"—a very noble enterprise of law enforcement." Chris cut back a sip. "Which someone with half your qualifications could manage."

"Thankfully I have half of my qualifications." Bones and I exchanged a look as he comfortably claimed a seat on the couch. "So what have you got?"

"Well," Chris tersely began. "As of over an hour ago, the facts are that Will has no family listed under power of attorney, and his emergency contact got us one of the four people he was living with in a little house over at Brynock Place. So I went to pay them a little visit."

By now we had all situated in my living room, me and Bones on the couch while Chris was on the easy chair on the other side of the coffee table. When Chris hesitated, I felt a lot of tension from Bones all over again, and looked between them. "What?"

"Let me just start with this: It was a young woman who answered the door. I wouldn't have recognized her, but you can imagine I was a bit shocked when she introduced herself as Antonia Doyo..."

This time I couldn't summon any kind of outburst. "Toni," I finally said. "Uhura's Toni."

Toni Doyo, you've probably guessed it, shouldn't exist any more than Kenley ought to. I met her on my first undercover job, at first having no idea she wasn't just another criminal. Every once in a while Terran intelligence gets annoyingly charitable ideas about sending in one of their own for a job we're really supposed to do, but Nyota Uhura could understand pretty much any language you'd hear in the city and had the ears to eavesdrop on three different conversations at once, so I'd say they made a damn good call with her.

Due to the jealously exclusive way the NDPD deals with their operations, I figure it couldn't have been the only time we ever had our undercovers get crossed; I could have gone till the end without knowing Toni wasn't really Toni if it weren't for the time somebody spilled an entire beer on her shirt and she would have possibly been in serious shit if the third man hadn't been in the can and I hadn't been the only one around to notice the tiny outline of her surveillance comm nested right under her chest. I had Will handsy her into a corner like an asshole until I was able to mutter into her ear that she needed to borrow my sweater and oh-by-the-way-I'm-NDPD. In hindsight, this would have been an unbelievably stupid thing to take for granted if I hadn't already noticed some things that nudged at my intuition about her, that Toni Doyo didn't add up to a real thing; it takes one to know one, and I'd been looking for where the edges might peel. I got a stern lecture from Chris about being reckless, but he also brings it up whenever he feels like recommending my instincts to anybody.

After that she had some of her identity info transferred to our system and we generally tried to have each other's backs, but it was hardly a bonding experience as I still couldn't tell you more than a couple things about the real Uhura. As for her, she insisted on calling me Will even when it was just the two of us, the teasing implication being that I was more like my cover than I realized, and I don't think we ever even said a proper goodbye. Being reminded of her for the first time in a while in such a context was downright bizarre, like she'd barged back into my life as some anonymous waitress or lawyer or somewhere else she wasn't supposed to be.

"I can't imagine what this is gonna do to your head, but with the preliminary stuff McCoy was able to do, it's looking more and more likely that that clone check could come back a match," Chris said. "I didn't recognize any other names and didn't get to meet the rest yet, but if they all end up being somebody's alias...You realize this looks like some messed-up paper dolls kind of stuff?"

"Paper dolls" was just a label applied from local urban mythos, and hearing Chris use the term with seriousness made me realize what it could mean that this dead body had shown up in our lives. This stuff was only supposed to be as real as our ghost stories, but hell, people believe those too. The whole thing had all come, supposedly, from the claims of a couple criminals who got identified by victims and insisted, repeatedly, that someone else had to be running around who looked exactly like them. These people may or may not have used the actual word "clone," but local conspiracy theorists were more than capable of filling in the gaps themselves.

It had facetiously occurred to me before that if anyone was going to get this far this fast in cloning technology, it might as well be in New Dublin; we had a wide range of basement lurkers who had gotten bored of engineering new hallucinogens or phetamines and started tinkering with other forms of mad-science-type stuff with disturbingly inhumane results. I'm proud to say our legal system knew to be one step ahead of these types and had already made certain cloning projects not only highly illegal but extremely difficult to get away with if you had any hope of actually inserting your creation into society, because you simply couldn't get very far in this city without so much as a valid birth certificate.

But right in front of us was the fact that the joke was on us. Whatever criminal genius had somehow managed to replicate virtually perfect humanoid beings, seemingly out of mid-air, had also figured out how to turn the law against itself. Whether you were going into an undercover gig for five days or for five years, procedure called for very thorough documentation that was the most seamless fake identification you could possibly get. And fuck knows how somebody had managed to hack into our systems well enough to be able to simply pick off a bunch of shelved aliases for the purpose of tacking them onto genetic copies, but I had a feeling that had probably been the _easy_ part.

"But he was my _age_ ," was the first thing I could say, even though I'd already pointed it out earlier.

"I know."

My mind was scanning over it, trying to make sense of any of it. "They can't be _clones_. A.I., maybe? I mean, I'm assuming we're not dealing with a guy who looks like me walking around with the mind of a two-year-old. And that's just to name one of the problems."

Bones scoffed and said what I was already thinking. "Can't be all A.I. Judging from the wounds, Jim, I'd say he was pretty damn organic."

"But he couldn't be _completely_...There has to be some unnatural component, to age them up like that, that's the part that I don't..." I was shaking my head. "Why didn't you grill them? Are you saving it for later, I mean, did they seem emotional about him or did they—?"

Bones was sighing at Chris, who was leaning back in his chair. "That's something I came here to talk to you about."

"What?"

"I felt around enough to have my doubts that this murder is just a mugging gone ugly. It might have been a little more personal; I know how you feel about profiling, Jim, but Gorman thinks this looks a little more motivated than that."

"Well, obviously," I muttered. When I got a couple cocked eyebrows, I said, "He had an old wristwatch. Those things are worth hundreds at the least. Hell of a thing to leave behind if it's quick money you're after."

Chris let out an affectionate scoff. "Right, the watch. There's also the fact that his wallet was completely untouched. And one of the first things we got out of Toni is that old Will said he was going to the library, so she couldn't understand what he was even doing on that side of town, which suggests it could be somebody he knew."

"Chris..." I was staring woodenly at the table, my voice tired and flat. "You can't really go questioning them before you know what they are. Chances are, whatever their situation is, they aren't going to take well to cops."

"Which is why I was hoping to try something a little...unique?"

"Oh, hell, would you spit it out?" Bones grumbled.

"Jim...Suppose I told Will's housemates that Will has been seriously assaulted and is in a coma at the moment? Would you know where I'm going with this?"

There was a pause. Then I said, "Oh Jesus Christ, you actually did that."

"We've got a case that looks like a clusterfuck of reluctant and potentially unreliable perspectives, not to mention the likelihood of turning up an eyewitness is next to nothing, and it could also be related to a clean-as-a-whistle cloning gig that we know absolutely nothing about. And we've got a _detective_ who looks exactly like the victim, and has plenty of experience doing undercover."

"Just say it, alright." Bones almost shouted, "You want to use him as bait."

I, on the other hand, had started laughing, finally managing only to exclaim, " _What_?"

Chris chose to address Bones first. "Doctor, you need to realize Jim isn't necessarily in a safe place no matter what he does right now. Or had it not occurred to you that the person who killed this guy could have actually had the wrong man?"

This had occurred to me pretty quickly, and still seemed like a solid possibility. I couldn't think of anyone who'd met me while I did undercover who would have been still carrying a big enough chip to want to off me, but there could be a couple dozen domestic abusers running around who wouldn't say no to a chance to at least beat me to a pulp. I definitely hadn't been planning on mentioning this to Bones. While he was sitting there processing that new and troubling thought, I cut in.

"Look, if it's somebody who wanted to kill me, him running into this guy probably only decreases the chances that anything could happen to me now," I started with, to calm Bones a bit. "But come on, Chris, are you pulling my leg? We're trained to make up shit, not just pick up in other people's lives, how the hell could that ever work?"

"With most people, it would dive-bomb, but Jim? You were good. One of the best, even."

"Nuh-uh. No way. I know this pair of identical twins—one of them is a ballet prodigy and the other has two left feet. What if he's into watercolors, or he plays the harmonica or, I don't know, doesn't even have a semblance of a normal life, considering we don't even know where he came from?"

A raise of eyebrows let me know Chris had done the tiniest bit of research, probably by some odd and sneaky line of questioning masquerading as conversation. "He's a student. A history major. You can swing that better than most cops I know, can't you?"

" _No_. No, I cannot fucking swing it, Chris. Okay, I get it: All the pieces are in place for it to work, in a very theoretical action-movie kind of way—There's the fact that investigating attempted murder and actual murder is pretty much the same, that's sharp, I'll give you that. It stacks up real nice. Except for the fact that it's _insane_. What makes you think I'd do this just because—because I _can_?"

Chris rocked back into some brief cursing exclamation, and then he interrupted himself with, " _Because you're Jim Kirk_."

Pike had snapped. He wasn't shouting, but he's the type who can make the carpet strands stand at attention without having to raise his voice a notch. In only a second I'd shut my mouth with a trained instinct of respect, as if I'd been yanked three years back to our weekly briefings and it wasn't even occurring to me that he wasn't my boss anymore.

"Because it's so 'insane' that it's spectacular, and you should be beside yourself with how crazy it is because this is something completely new and it's fallen right into your hands. Instead you're shaking in your boots? What the fuck has gotten into you, son? You get one ugly case and you're practically ready to slide behind a desk, for Christ sake."

I could feel Bones at my side cringing up with that dreading look like a kid stuck with two infuriated parents, that instinct that somebody had just shot up the elephant in the room. My jaw was tensing as Chris and I stared hard at each other, and then I snatched up his glass and went over to the bar to mix him another drink, working in noisy blunt motions with my back turned to both of them.

The rumor mill around law enforcement is more thorough than God could make it, so it didn't surprise me that Chris had a good idea what was really going on. I had accepted that ninety percent of the department had at least heard of me by this point simply because of Op 86, but only the odd moron ever approached me about it. Most people knew: Jim Kirk is not someone who you want to ask about that mess, don't even bother. That beast of a case had skulked right through me, left me wanting to tell all my trusty noble ideals to fuck off and feeling incapable of doing the job I once thought I'd been born for, and as if that hadn't been enough, it had had the wicked afterthought to tear off with the most important friendship I've ever had. There was a part of my mind constantly ready to catch on fire at the mere thought of any of it.

I was raw from an operation that had seemed specifically designed by some big sick force to slowly pull Spock apart at the edges. It was possibly partly because of his luck that something had really shaken me from the moment I saw Will's body. There had been a time when I'd thought that my partner and I were wound so tight that our fates were the same, and that by severing myself away before he could pull me down with him I'd dodged the bullet the city had clocked on me. But when I saw that body, I thought that it was still trying to get me the way that it got to him.

I had to hand it to Chris, though. There was no way I could have really explained to him how much of a line he'd crossed by bringing this up, and if someone else had waltzed into my home for a drink and then proceeded to toss all of this in my face because they thought I needed a good kick in the pants, I would have thrown him out within a second. But the fact was, he was right.

If this whole oddity had happened just over half a year ago, I would have been eating the whole thing up. At the crime scene I might have deadpanned that I didn't see the resemblance because I was clearly way more good-looking than the dead guy, or suggested that the squad call the case Operation Dead Ringer. Chris had always been a master at twisting people's arms, and in the span of less than a minute, he'd managed to make me go from being afraid of being tangled up with Will Kenley to being solidly worried about what was going to happen to me if I _didn't_ take the case. And I knew even then how it would go: I could give him this whole run-around about how I was going to think about it and then probably spend what was left of the night speeding my bike around town in a gruff, indecisive stupor that would land me in the inevitable direction. Or I could cut the crap and take the job now.

When I went to set Pike's drink down and then sink slowly back onto the couch, I said nothing. I knew that Chris could read the bullet points of everything that had just gone through my head and that Bones could too if he tried hard enough, so I just waited for somebody else to talk.

"Isn't someone going to consider," Bones slowly put in, "how potentially barbaric this is?"

Pike said, "Pardon?"

"Jim was just asking a couple minutes ago if the others seemed to care about the guy? What if they do? You're just gonna do a curtsy and hop out when you're done after you've led them to believe their buddy's still alive?"

I tried not to, but I knew Chris and I were looking at each other with a sigh of resistance to that angle that would make Bones feel like we thought he was naive; compassion is part of the job, but ideally only in more global perspectives. I knew how badly a case could get bent over and fucked by too much emotional involvement, and I definitely wouldn't have any room for it if I was helping with this one.

"Depending on how things happen, we might not have to leak it to the kids that he died any earlier," Chris explained, and for a second I could only shake my head at how hard he'd already thought about this. "He could always slack off on taking his antibiotics or something. If it runs too far on time, we could have him go out on his own and allegedly get hit crossing a street..."

Bones just made a vague uncomfortable cursing noise.

"Can we not overlook that a guy just got stabbed to death?" Chris was a little more defensive now. "Say if it actually had been Jim in that alley. Would you be able to deal with some asshole making you think he was alive for a few more weeks if it was in the interest of getting the bastard who did it?"

Bones had submitted before Chris was even done. "Fine. I get it."

I did something between a smirk and an overly touched pout in his direction until he glared.

"I'm going to hold a preliminary meeting with all relevant teams involved, probably two days from now," Chris said calmly. "I won't put you down as committed yet. All you're agreeing to do is show up."

After a few seconds and a sigh, I nodded. "Sure."

"You're a fine man, Kirk," Chris said over-jovially, standing up to leave.

Bones stuck by after he'd left, but we avoided the topic of anything that had happened that night until his cab arrived. By then I'd gotten to that point where I was too close to morning to tell my body to sleep, so I wound up lying on my back on the couch, staring at the ceiling. The facts were kicking in.

I kept trying to bring up the image again of the body, reexamining it as if I would somehow spot an imperfect differentiation just from thinking hard enough about what I'd looked at. It doesn't make much sense, but the confirmation of this guy likely being a virtual clone hadn't made things that marginally stranger than it already was to know that Will had existed in the first place.

I've always known that I have a nice face. My mother did start boasting on from my preteen years that I was the handsomest kid in town and hell if I'm the kind of guy to call his mama a liar, so there, but I want to emphasize that what I never thought I had, what I was attracted to and tended to envy, was looking unique. I had always thought of myself as the kind of good-looking that gets into advertisements, that your eyes skim right over like wallpaper because there's nothing distinctive that really socks you in the eyes.

I felt surprised and foolish, then, about the fact that the idea of somebody else walking around wearing the same features provoked a ridiculous possessive streak in me. The thought of someone getting up this costume shaped like me and parading it for some possibly perverse use inspired something like revulsion. It ended up irrationally directed at Will himself, but I couldn't help it. The poor bastard's face was the only one in the equation; it was hard not to feel like he'd crept out of nowhere. I couldn't feel sorry for him.


	2. Chapter 2

Right after I showed up to the office the next day I got a comm from Pike telling me where the meeting would be held. Even though most of the people present would be from Murder, he'd convinced them all to come over to the Undercover office, which was a huge relief for me; I didn't feel like confronting too much _deja vu_.

"Have you talked to Leonard since yesterday?"

"No," I replied, then realized why he was probably asking. "He finish the examination?"

"Yeah. He'll be telling me more than that right before the meeting, but he's pretty tied up before then."

Bones hates having to repeat himself, and while this was an instance where he was probably willing to make an exception, I'd already planned not to harp on him about anything he'd found until the actual meeting. There wasn't a peep from my on-duty communicator for all of my Saturday, and that morning was split between paperwork and the distracted contemplation of all the rustling activity I knew that Chris and a couple others would be taking care of already. They'd be questioning the hell out of Will's housemates about everything conceivably related to an assault investigation, and for those who got comfortable enough to not really notice, everything that wasn't even related at all. The house was going to be stampeded, probably every foot of Will's room analyzed and imaged. I usually had a lot of sympathy for people who had to deal with our overwhelming brigade, but in this case I didn't really know what to think.

Bones and I met up on Sunday morning when he came to give me a ride. I had to give him directions to Undercover, and when we got there Bones let out a whistle, unable to help commenting on how much spiffier the place was compared to the Murder Squad's office. Murder had always been a little more in touch with the small-trade technology that was "retro" to the tourists but eventually customary to New Dubliners, and undercovers loved to take any chance to remind them of that. But considering that homicide records were pretty safely kept to paper systems and half of UCD's personnel were currently on suspension for suspicion that one of them may have sold data passwords to a skinjob lab, I was thinking it was going to be a while before they could brag to us again.

 _Them_ , I bit at myself. _Not "us."_

"What's with the most discrete subdivision of the NDPD getting the biggest headquarters?"

"It's not all UCD," I said. "Illegal Sciences uses over half of this building, actually."

"Ah," Bones said. "The good old Black Math Squad."

Bones and I were almost done dancing through security later when he said, "Ah, there she is," noticing the early arrival of a tall blond figure all the way down the narrow hall standing waiting for the elevator.

"Who's that?"

"That," Bones said, "is our robopathologist."

"Robo-what-now?" I demanded, "That's a field?"

"Anything can be a field if somebody puts enough work into it. In this case, it was her husband, this guy Korby who invented the word 'robopathology' for basically anything that's a combination of medical and technical diagnostics. Cute, right?"

"You're telling me there are specialists for this type of shit we're dealing with?"

"I'm saying she's the one. And today's her lucky day." In response to the look I had on now, Bones smiled a bit sheepishly. "She's a nurse most days. We used to work on the same floor."

"Leonard." We were within a range that she'd turned to notice us. "Morning."

"Hey. This is—"

"Jim Kirk, I presume." She flashed me a great smile just after a flinch got into her features at the sight of me. She'd seen the body. "It's Chapel. Christine if you like."

I reached out to shake her hand, blinking. "Pleasure."

When we were in the elevator, the shimmying around some people who were already in there placed us far enough away from Chapel that I could intentionally irk Bones by whispering, "My, my, who would divorce _her_?"

"Nobody yet, and thank God you didn't try that on her as a line. Why the hell would you assume that?"

"If they were still much of a team wouldn't her husband be here?"

"He's not here because he's dead."

"...When did he die?" After a second my mouth dropped open. "Holy shit: _Roger_ Korby? That one doctor who—"

"Shut the hell up now."

"Oh, man, from what I heard that case was fucking screwy."

"The guy was fucking screwy, now shut _up_ , and don't you dare mention that to anyone else."

"Of course I won't." I sighed. Just when Bones maybe thought I would actually shut it: "He was also, like _wickedly_ ingenious, is the thing..."

Bones went more dramatically back into rolling his eyes, but I was interrupted by the elevator tapping to a stop at one of the underground levels. The air was noticeably cooler when the doors opened and most of the rush exited into an already partly occupied hall. Apparently there was more than one meeting on this floor.

"And on Sunday," I mumbled.

Chapel heard it and shrugged. "They have to organize a hell of an inquisition if they're hoping to get a lead on whoever might have helped the harvester."

"Yeah, I'm not envying that job," I said with a scoff.

The meeting room was a long-tabled high-tech affair where you felt an immediate sterility when you entered that made you want to keep your voice down. Bones and I stuck to the same side of the table, and as other people entered, the unofficial rule of sequestering Murder to one side and everyone else on the other unconsciously started to stick.

I wanted to groan in annoyance with the first couple people from homicide who were apparently on task for external investigations: So far it was Joey Kelly, who I've always known only pretends to dislike me out of social rules that smack of purely teenage politics, and Rock—I've never bothered to figure out whether that's his first or last name—who I have often labeled the stupidest good detective in New Dublin. We honestly have a lot in common, including our reputations for getting by purely on looks and luck, but the problem is he's never given me the same benefit of the doubt I've given him and I've never given enough of a shit to prove him wrong.

Then there were the officers from IS, none of whom I knew. I was saved from a polite and boring spell of small talk with one of them when somebody came in and tapped me at the elbow; I turned and saw Detective Rand cocking her eyebrow at me.

"So I hear your somebody's evil twin."

"Apparently." I grinned, realizing with some surprise that I was extremely happy to see her. "Damn, Janice, it's been a while."

"It has, boy, you don't comm, you don't write. Though I assume you can't have done anything disastrous in the last few months. How's Spock doing?"

I parried, "How's _Junior_? Apparently he's finally had the sense to promote you."

My old superintendent, who I was thankful wasn't needed here because of Pike's staggering rank, was called "Junior" everywhere but to his face at the homicide offices; it was for the fact that his intelligence made us all deduce it was only because of his father's founding role in starting up the NDPD that he ever got a job as a police officer in the first place. Annoyance with him was a safer topic than the weather, and Janice's eyes went rolling right away.

"It's hard not to think it was just because you left the job open. Thanks for that, by the way. I swear, sometimes he still makes me feel like a glorified legal secretary."

I was going to try for a reassuring joke when we were interrupted by Kelly bumping her elbow with his so she'd take the coffee he grabbed for her off of his hands. After that she went to claim a seat at the table next to him and Rock, and I felt the thin but undeniable wall between the different sides of the room.

The last time I would have seen all of them, it had been uncomfortable common knowledge around the precinct that Joey Kelly was helplessly in love with Janice and possibly always would be, but in only a couple minutes' time I figured out that wasn't there anymore; he laughed a tiny bit more at her than with her when Rock made a crack about the extra packets of sugar she was dumping into her drink, and only looked at her for a second or two at a time. Rock was stretching his arm behind Joey's back to show off some pictures of his newborn goddaughter, his grin making his eyes seem to glow a brighter green. Janice was now getting more mileage out of the 'F' word than I was used to hearing and was now too busy to do much more with her hair than let it hang in a short bob. I had been gone for just four or five months, and they all were like continents that had jumped perceptible miles while I'd been looking away for only a moment. It bothered me more than it should have.

Chris finally came in, towing with him a bunch of data displays he was hooking up to the huge overhead monitor when Bones got out his notes and went up to ask him a couple things. Soon enough the last straggler from IS came in and sat, and Chris cleared his throat.

"Okay, first thing: You all need to pay close attention, but understand that the operation isn't a go just yet. I wanted all divisions to be able to compare notes, so we'll start with medical forensics, I think. Doctor McCoy, if you could at least start with the basics..."

Bones was valiantly professional about it, as I had to be, even when the others reacted with some morbid fascination at the photos of the body as he went through the preliminary fundamentals: Cause of death was nothing odd; he died within minutes from the stabbing. There were the nutrition facts, the lack of hard drug use, lack of recent sexual intercourse, etc. He went over the cuts and contusions on various parts of the body, but none seemed unusual for a physical struggle leading up to getting stabbed.

"You all know from the report that he placed an emergency call but was unable to verbally respond to the dispatcher, and by the time police arrived, he was dead..." Bones said, "From my observation, he was possibly unable to say something because of the onset of shock or brain death, but it's also likely he was incapable of vocalizing clearly because of internal bleeding.

"As for...other diagnostics." Bones paused. "The body _is_ genetically identical to James T. Kirk, with some, uh, 'mechanical' variation, but possibly not as much as you'd expect. For one, we obviously know that he's younger, but I have an estimate that he was created about three years ago, which is just about as old as he can be if he was made to match the alias. Whether there was an actual fetal or infant stage or if the genetic development was somehow grafted onto some base form of artificial life at an older life state is impossible to tell. However, analysis of the bone development indicated that the body was forced through some kind of hormonally stimulated hyper-growth. Uh, Ms. Blake, you said earlier..."

An IS officer said, "I wanted to point out that there are known drugs formerly discovered by us that could induce that kind of abnormal growth; we don't think they were invented for that use, and we haven't seen it used to such an extreme, but..." She shrugged. I suddenly wished I had friends from Black Math; I'd never heard of anything like that before.

"We know it's out there." Bones nodded. "The growing pains could give anybody a less than sunny personality, that's all I'll say about that. Aside from the irregular cell growth, the body would otherwise appear to be somewhere between 26 and 28—possibly younger than Kirk, but only by a year or so, definitely not too perceptively."

"Hang on." Kelly had his hand raised. "How were genetic samples attained in the first place? There's no data in the systems you can use to map somebody's DNA..."

Chris shrugged, looked grim. "It's pretty much the proof we've got that the harvester obviously has a link to the real identities and was able to track them down. All they would have had to do is pretend to be a custodian and poke around Jim's desk..."

"Lovely," I remarked, wanting to cut off the talkative exclamations at the other end of the table, when a member of IS asked something.

"So are we assuming that there's some motive related to the fact that the sources are involved with law enforcement? I ask because it just seems unbelievable that an organization that's capable of doing all this wouldn't be able to find _some_ other way..."

"They wouldn't go to the trouble matching them up with aliases, you mean?" I asked, shrugging. "We can't rule out the possibility that the type of people who do this stuff are attracted to the cleanliness of it. Not just how intellectually tantalizing it might be to, ooh, make covers into real people, but they may have even thought about the advantages of it if they ever had any of their clones discovered. For example, if I'd made a lot more enemies as Will Kenley, there might be some hesitation to do a case that would draw public attention to the fact that Will was an informant, because it could get me into some trouble."

Someone in IS cocked an eyebrow at that and bluntly underlined something in his notes. I swerved the inquiries back to Bones.

"What about the mental development?"

"Pitch perfect, actually, though it's harder to tack an age on that," Bones said. While some whispering went around the room, he exchanged a look with Chapel who was already coming up to the front so he could mutter some question to her before she nodded at him, shrugged and took over.

Chapel was confident and brisk, hardly giving off that this wasn't the type of thing she did every day. "I was asked to examine the only non-organic components that were to be found anywhere in Kenley's organs. His brain appeared to be very delicately wired to an artificial memory system; his procedural learning and memory is at least partly natural, but it's possible that from a certain point in his history, all of his episodic memory is installed and completely fabricated."

Joey asked, "Can I get that dumbed down a bit?"

My mind was still reeling with too much new information but I tried to fill in: "You're saying that it's possible his memories were entirely rebooted and rewritten at one point, but that his, um, skill memory...how to walk and talk and read, could have naturally carried over? But the, um, autobiographical info is corruptible because of the mechanism..."

"Jesus," Rand exclaimed at a whisper.

"And we're presuming," Rock slowly asked, "this is used to market them. That you can, say, program somebody to think they've been your spouse for five years?"

You could feel the skin starting to crawl all over the room; I kept my nose in my notes. I'd dealt with the worst I could have imagined about the situation already.

"We're presuming," Chapel confirmed. "And Pike will have more to say about this, but that would mean that someone could still be exercising some kind of control over the, uh, residents." She cleared her throat.

Chris took the cue. "Thanks, Chapel," he said without looking up from the notes he was currently going through.

Next to me Bones sank back with the confirmation that his part in this meeting was mostly done, and finally let into the mood his entire weekend had been cooking up to. I heard him grumble something about "I should go back to being a damn surgeon," and covered an affectionate smirk with my hand.

"Okay," Chris said, now leaning into his hands and standing at the front of the table. "Let's detail what we had on the actual body real quick: Our Will was not carrying any kind of weapon except for an army knife. He had a personal comm with a very limited social life: only seven comm numbers that weren't restaurants. He was carrying in one side of his jacket a notepad with nothing much besides doodles and grocery lists in it; and on the other, our goldmine..."

He was looking at me as he set it on the table. It was a multi-use PADD, the types students often had but obviously a pretty nice one.

I was cocking my eyebrow expectantly before he proclaimed, "It's got all the notes you could possibly need to bullshit your way through History 301, an efficiently kept personal calendar, _and_...nine plus hours of recorded home footage."

My mouth fell into what I suppose was a pleased 'O' of surprise. That last bit was the jackpot I'd felt like Chris was probably waiting to spring on me if I was still wishy-washy about committing to the investigation. It could make all the difference in whether I felt I could pull off the operation at all. I didn't know whether the PADD sitting there a few feet away from me felt heavy and ominous or like something I couldn't wait to get my hands on the second this meeting was over.

"Another thing: While there were signs of struggling, there was no traceable evidence anywhere on Will that would lead us to an identity. The only thing we've got was that some blood was found on the wall a couple yards from the body; it could have been related to the fight, or it could have somehow gotten there at any point that day or even earlier, it's difficult to tell. The blood gave us no solid genetic match, but it was copper-based, which typically belongs to Vulcanoids or, more likely, an Orion. And yes, it should be noted that the location of the crime is smack-dab in the middle of a gang turf; most people around there _would_ be nervous to be out there alone at night, but at the same time, we don't know this particular group to trouble themselves with small-time killing unless there's a personal motivation."

"Which group are we looking at?" Janice asked; the external parts of the homicide operation were where she'd be more involved. "The Saiphon? They're pretty exclusively Orion, right?"

Joey said, "Yeah, that's their territory. There's a rumor the big boss has a claim to the museum, even. Sorry," he added to Chris, for fraying the conversation.

"I'll probably go over more about that with you guys later, but we need to get to the residents," Chris continued. "I'm going to start off by saying that out of the four people Will was living with, there's one we haven't been able to link to a known genetic source. The rest are pulled from police handles just like Will.

"Other possibly relevant details: All identified genetic sources are aged between 25 and 31; all of the aliases are no longer in active undercover use, and all were initially created for that purpose as part of our own UCD, with the exception of Uhura's, whose information was submitted to us at some point from the TIA. We noted no genetic predispositions to any severe medical complications when we attained information from the sources, so they've got pretty healthy codes. Another notable similarity is that all of the sources are pretty young for undercover officers, which might be related to the fact that they're all individuals of above average intelligence."

A snort at the other side of the table: "Yeah, except for Kirk."

"Don't be a shitbird, Rock," Chris lightly warned. "Kirk's aptitudes place him as a genius."

I wasn't in the mood to be insulted by the blatant cynicism held by a couple people in the room, and just sat there smirking instead of entertaining the immediate hubbub of the other side of the table placing bets on my actual numbers. I didn't even specifically remember them; Chris was in an appeasing mood, rolled his eyes and looked it up for them. Rand won dinner.

While the talking had been dying off Chris had got up the specific IDs on the residents: At one point he glanced over at me, and he had this _look_ , like he was gloating over knowing something I didn't know. It made Bones cock an eyebrow at me, and I just shrugged and nudged him with my elbow.

The first ID that went up was Toni's driver's license: I squinted as if I was actually looking for a notable difference, but of course I wasn't going to find one in the perfectly familiar pretty angles of her face. She hadn't bothered smiling for the picture and her black hair was in a laid-back braid down the side of her neck, grown very long.

"Source name is Nyota Uhura; alias is Antonia Doyo. She claims she's Dominican Terran and that her parents are long deceased. She is a double major focusing on history and," Chris paused and, for my sake, added in a sort of dry _ta-da!_ , "linguistics."

" _Shocker_ ," I sang back in sarcasm.

"Next we have Ken Toshiro. Source name is Hikaru Sulu."

The record was a student ID this time. Toshiro had a kind of intentionally-overdoing-it smirk in the photo, thick brows, a smooth boyish cut and a slight slice of bright white teeth. Something made me want to like him; I felt like I'd heard of Sulu, but I'd definitely never met the guy.

Chris read off, "History with a specific interest in exploration and colonization. Claims to have been born in Japan and then moved with his family to the sector when he was still a toddler; neglected to answer any questions about his relationship with his parents but said that they are still alive."

In response to this, a few styluses were moving fiercely. Mine was not: Chris had gone to the next card.

"A few of you will recognize Detective Spock. Our copy goes by the name Danek, son of I-can't-pronounce-it-but-he-doesn't-exist-either-way, is majoring in history and minoring in astronomy. He neglected to tell me anything about his family, but implied that he's lived here a good amount of time."

Regardless of whether he had much of any knowledge of the implicit complications, I felt like it was kind of a dick move for Chris to spring this on me without any kind of warning, but the thing is, I could have seen it coming. I hadn't, because my mind just hadn't ever put Spock into that category: I had for a time completely forgotten that he'd ever done any undercover.

But I remembered, it was a very brief assignment he'd been recruited to do only a few months after I'd started on the murder squad—something they'd apparently needed a Vulcan for badly enough to tap the only one in the entire department, regardless of his inexperience. My memory of the time only served me vague impressions of wandering around making coffee runs, third-wheeling on cases and being generally bored out of my mind on top of more than a little worried by the nagging thought that he was going to end up getting shot before I even had the chance to get to know him much better.

I of course had a half-dazed awareness that Bones was looking over at my reaction and that Chris had probably already checked a surreptitious glance in the middle of speaking, but my attention was glued to the photo of Danek up on the monitor. The identical Vulcan possessed all of Spock's severe and soft features, the rich dark eyes peering at me from the ID, and it was impossible to believe it was anyone other than my former partner. He had a dark red scarf over something equally basic and generally looked like someone you'd presume to be approachable but might still hesitate to talk to. He wasn't wearing any particular facial expression; what was there was neutral rather than frigid. I noted that his hair was even similar to how Spock's had been after I'd persuaded him that interviewees might find him less intense if he at least grew his bangs out some, which he'd kept relenting over even after he figured out it was part of my ongoing plot to get one of the techs to ask him out.

"And last, we have our wild card." Chris was already moving to the next resident, and the screen now showed what looked like a pretty young Orion woman with a wavy explosion of red hair, a true grin on her face, features that all popped so that you didn't know whether to look at her eyes or her mouth or somewhere else. "First name is Gaila; at some point she picked up the last name Vro, but seemed to be implying she picked the name herself as lots of Orions do. Her story's about as vague as you'd expect: She hasn't seen her family since she was seventeen and skedaddled out of Orion looking for honest work. She's majoring in history with a special interest in politics. And the point I have to make is that she may or may not even be a clone. We can't trace her to a fake, but we can't assume she is who she says she is either."

I'd been expecting Chris to get to this point sooner or later, but chose to ask about it now. "So they're all history majors, right? Did you ask them how they met?"

Chris nodded quickly. "Yeah, see, despite the supposed age differences they're _all_ in the middle of their second year, with the weird exception being Will, who was a junior, though obviously a 'transfer student.' Which meshes pretty well with them all claiming they met at orientation where he was volunteering to help with some lecture thing."

"Well, that's bollocks," Joey muttered eloquently.

"The thing is," Chris interrupted, and his next bit was marked with a tone of disbelief and frustration, "I've already talked to half the kids who go to the college who are acquainted with the group. So far I've asked nine of them how they all met, and they've all said it, 'They've been hanging out since history orientation.' And they can't all be taking their word for it, because this girl Kara West who seems to be an actual friend of theirs was _there_."

"Does Kara check out as human?" I asked.

"Am I a detective?"

"Just checking."

"So we're either looking at some very elaborately staged way of meeting each other just on the off chance that they would some day need an alibi..."

"How could it be anything else?" one of the IS officers demanded. "I'm not about to believe they all just met by _accident_ , even if they were somehow... _programmed_ with a predisposition to communicate with each other. The only thing they'd seem to have in common besides their majors is being a couple years older than the average first-year."

I spoke up with a clearing of my throat. "Stop me if I get this wrong, Chris, but we've basically got two possibilities going?"

He gave me a small smile and a gesture to take it from there.

"Since it is practically a given that the three at least have to be copies, I'm coming up on two theories: Because the possibility of an assortment of them just happening to find each other is pretty much nil, they would have to either be currently still actively engaged in some purpose they were created or purchased for, or all be currently exercising independence after somehow escaping some manner of control. If we're pointing at Vro as a suspect in the cloning mess, she may well be somehow in control of their situation, but she could also just be a student who has no idea whatsoever that there is anything unusual about her housemates. And with the ability to program them, as theoretical as all that is, we can't rule out the possibility that anyone else who regularly has access to them, even if they aren't one of the residents, is involved in their exploitation."

A couple people around the table were putting up hands so that Chris would give them a second to jot down a couple things. Finally he said, "Chapel here told me she finds it really unlikely that any kind of programming could ensure that a group of people would talk to each other, much less become roommates simply because of personality subroutines, which..."

"Personality subroutines don't seem credible, is what I want to say," Chapel said. "Of course it's theoretical when we're only working with what we've seen, but I've researched every single record to be found on legal and illegal harvesting of artificial intelligence, and every A.I. specialist has told me that the more advanced the ability to learn becomes, the more you run into a paradox: a mind that is advanced enough to grow and change _cannot_ be programmed to have a certain personality, or it's just too likely to crash. That can only be picked up through experience, and in this case, organic predispositions. If you need me to dumb that down? I really don't think two of the residents could have been deliberately built to 'like' each other. It just doesn't work that way."

"Which is why I think the only possibilities are that they faked a first meeting, or..." From his tone, I knew this was the theory Chris liked: "Maybe more than one but not all of the residents are more than aware of what they are, and they're just very instrumental with people. All it would take is having some certainty they would all be in the same room at some point, and one or more of them working some magic..."

Janice mumbled, "This is making my head hurt."

Shaking his head, Chris said, "If you don't all understand by now why I want to put somebody on the inside, I don't know what to tell you."

"I have a pretty important question for Illegal Sciences," I piped up. This took even Chris by surprise as I turned with a smart polite smile and asked that section of the table, "Am I a suspect?"

After a blinking moment, one IS member said, "What?" which seemed to annoy the person sitting next to her.

"It's just, it would seem like the first person to try to look at would be the genetic source, since I might have felt like growing myself an organ donor and there's enough of a relationship there that offers a sort of panic motive."

Despite Rock's opinion of me, he was grinning and enjoying this. Most people on Murder don't exactly dislike IS, but for some reason it's a tradition to kick them in their shiny jewels whenever possible. The same would go for Undercover if anyone was actually willing to mess with them.

The woman who'd shared about the hormone medicine seemed to be rolling her eyes at the rest of her team. "You're saying we need to clear you of suspected status before you're involved in the operation. Do you have an alibi?"

"Why, yes, I do," I said brightly, thinking dryly that my nosy gym buddy might come in handy after all and that I owed him a cigarette next time I saw him.

"How can he have an alibi for the DNA sourcing, though?"

"Doesn't matter," Chris said. "He just needs to be clear of possible murder because on the page, we only have to pick between this being a murder investigation and an IS investigation. Handing over evidence to Sciences at a later time suspends reliability policies; it won't be very clean, it will give you some pain-in-the-ass delays, but it's doable. It's my favorite loophole in the entire handbook."

"You've already thought about this?" I asked Chris, laughing.

"And you're thinking very bureaucratically for a case you may not even be doing," he replied, taking the opportunity to raise me a questioning eyebrow.

The room instantly became much more trained in my direction and I realized we were at the moment of truth, if not already past it. The air tightened in on me, but I felt it like an exhilarating kick. The half of my mind that had been anxiously jumping over this entire idea and petulantly waiting for the rest of it to get with the picture might as well have been doing a little victory dance.

I gave it an aloof stretch of a few seconds, my face almost spreading into a nervous grin, then sighed. "When is Will waking up?"

 

 

Bones was blinking closely at the photo, nervously fingering at his instrument table with the other hand. He gave me a close look, then another at the photo, then back at me again, then set it down in an abrupt slap. "This is way too damn weird."

"Bones, come on," I was whining. "I drank all this tequila thinking we were going to be doing this tonight."

Chris was looking between the two of us. "Doctor, I thought you were alright with this."

"I said it could be done, sure, I didn't say that _I_ would do it."

The three of us were at Leonard's place, in the big office that functioned as a perfectly good creepy little lab area when he had any reason to work from home. I was sitting on the shiny steel operation table and restlessly kicking my legs around off the side. "The sooner we do it, the more it can start healing and look convincing by the time I'm in there. What's the big deal, anyway, it's only the second time you'll have cut me up this week..."

"It wasn't _you_ , smartass, and excuse me for not thinking it's really inside the duties of my profession to maim you," Bones said back, shaking his head at how cute I thought I was being. Chris could only look a little perversely satisfied, obviously enjoying that I was showing the kind of dedication that most people in his position could only say his officers _would_ have.

"You're not _maiming_ me, good God, you said it wouldn't have to be that deep to look like I'd had surgery. Hell, you even said you wanted to go back to being a surgeon, so..." I gave a shrug and wobbled back when my jeans slipped against the table, laughing.

"Don't even. And I told you, it could leave a scar."

I dismissed that with a little wave of apathy. Somehow sensing that Bones was coming around, I went conversational: "Why'd you become an M.E., anyway?"

"Because it was fate that you and I would meet and that you would drive me slowly but surely from sanity," Bones said flatly, and he was getting out the sanitizers. "Shirt off and bite a belt or something, before I change my mind."

"So..." Chris looked maybe a little uneasy for the first time. It was a weird look on him. "Don't you have any anesthetics?"

"For what, Chief? The corpses?"

 

 

We were back at my apartment and I was on the couch trying to assure Bones it hadn't been that bad, unable to stop occasionally looking or prodding at the new wound under my shirt. Considering that the surveillance kit would mean I'd be clothed as much as possible, the chance of somebody catching me shirtless was pretty obscure, but Chris had confirmed that the bathroom door didn't lock and I'd decided that if I was going to screw up this cover, I really didn't want it to happen while I was wearing a towel.

Chris got a comm and took it out on the veranda; when it was left just me and Bones, he started saying something chatty about how rich Christine Chapel was probably going to find the whole surgery scar thing.

"Hey, Bones," I said at a slight pause, my voice quieter than when Chris had been in the room. "I want to say thanks."

He knew I wasn't talking about the graze, and he gave me a narrow look. "What for?"

"Just...You haven't been as hard on me about doing the op as I thought you'd be. I know you didn't want me signed on."

"Actually." Bones sat up a little; he didn't want to admit it, but he said, "I'm glad you took the job."

"Oh." I cleared my throat, and then had kind of a delayed reaction while I scraped my finger along a tear on my beer label. "I guess I'm confused here, because that pretty much contradicts everything you've been saying to Chris. Or the way you've been acting about it for the last few days. And, I don't know, your personality in general?"

He let out a sigh. "I just got to realizing that it's only going to mean the difference between worrying about you all the time and worrying about you all the time, so what's the point in stopping you."

I scoffed. "Um, I think there's a difference between worrying about this and worrying that some drunk abuser might throw a frying pan at my head."

"You know that's not what I meant." I thought Bones wasn't going to say anything else, but then he seemed to be checking if Chris was about to come back in. "It's just, how you've been since this whole thing came up. The day of the meeting, and even on the night we found the body...It's like something about it makes you nervous as hell, but at the same time, you're totally high on it. You're reminding me of _you_. I haven't seen you like that since..."

The turn of the conversation had surprised me so much that I hadn't gotten up my defenses, but Bones seemed to have realized that wasn't a thought he should follow up on. Chris' footsteps were padding back into the living room, and when he appeared around the doorway he was holding Will's PADD.

"Are you ready for this?"

"I'm drunk and diced. There isn't gonna be a better time." I elbowed Bones. "You wanna be around for this, right?"

"I'm pretty sure I'll die of curiosity if I don't bother," he'd already decided.

While Chris was hooking up the media chip to my big screen, I got up my notes and asked, "Do we have a number yet?"

"Op 17," Chris told me without looking up.

As I entered it in and flitted through a couple of my files I remarked, "I almost get nostalgic for the old operation names. The numbers are so boring."

"Black Math still does it old-fashioned, like it's to prove they actually have a sense of humor," Chris remarked, then let out a sudden laugh. "You guys remember 'Operation Annihilate'?"

"Yes," I hissed, grinning as I recalled, "Don't forget the exclamation point on the end."

Chris backed up from the screen. "Cue it up to about ninety minutes."

"You've already watched some of it?"

"Course I have."

I did as told with the remote piece, then sat there tapping it on my cheek until Chris gave me a look of "Ready when you are."

I was still seriously drunk, but if I'd been any more present the tension in the room might have snapped. The alcohol glazed over the whole bemusing reality of it a bit, but once I clicked the recording on and heard a clip of my own voice mid-word, the air still seemed to jolt into a tingle. "Ohfuck," I whispered, my hand going up in the air to do nothing in particular before it landed back on my knee.

"—he wanted to see it," Will was saying from where he stood mostly turned away from the camera, indicating something on a wall. It was a dark room, a little echoey like an old basement. There was something simultaneously patient and bored in his demeanor; he held a sweater over his shoulder by a couple hooked fingers.

"He didn't _want_ to." A man's voice from behind the camera, had to be Ken. "We just—"

"He won't believe how bad it looked when he gets back, and by then..." That was Toni off-screen. In response to it, Will looked over just behind the camera, and I felt like something was breathing across the hairs all over my skin. For only half a second the camera light made the blue of his eyes blaze, and then the focus lilted off to the left again.

Without even realizing it, I had leaned slowly and intently forward on the couch, unblinkingly focused on Will so much that I lost all track of what the conversation in the recording was about: the mannerisms and threads between his movements were somehow so much louder, embedding into some gradual confirmation that this man had been entirely real. I think up until we'd switched on that recording, I'd still been entertaining all the spook and superstition about the situation and been halfway expecting Will and Toni and the others to truly be our packages of lies staggering into life just to come out and haunt us.

But my clone, I quickly guessed, was possibly even less like my previous version of Will Kenley than I was. His movements were more careful and discrete, his presence almost pensive and distant. These things pulsed him into being to me more than the things he was saying. I had had to work on physicality in undercover before, but this was going to be in a different league entirely.

Bones probably would have been making a lot of noise if Chris and I hadn't technically been working at the moment. I found myself unable to even look away long enough to guess what he was thinking about any of it.

" _Oh_ mygod," Toni exclaimed almost at the same time as something falling, and started laughing kind of huskily. Then the camera was on her, Ken chuckling at her reaction to some old wine bottle that she'd knocked over. It was still hard for me to tell myself it wasn't Uhura, much like it had been when I'd seen her picture, but over the minutes she began to edge out of my expectations. Even with how little I knew about the person she'd indirectly come from, there was something immediately different about Toni. "Shut _up_. This place is giving me the creeps. We could—"

The recording went black, then the screen showed a green pair of crossed legs—It was one of those ubiquitous testing-the-button shots, over as soon as it had skipped, and then it was Gaila and Toni at what looked like a costume store, the background a long rainbow of feather boas and some other sequined surface. Gaila's eyes dazzled over a grin; she and Toni were sort of posing with these headbands with furry animal ears. Toni was in the middle of some chatty suggestion while Gaila was rocking into her and clasping her arm around her, making as if to lick Toni's face and making her go into a cringing laugh. Will, apparently holding the camera: "Um, the guy's giving us looks. Di—"

Skipping again: Some fireworks were going off in the sky and someone was holding the camera, walking behind Ken and Will with their hands in their pockets and up too far ahead for any of their conversation to be heard.

None of the recordings were quite the stereotypical use of a home camera, but at the same time, we watched almost an hour of it and I couldn't help but be struck by the unmistakable normalcy. Chris hadn't been betting on the bunch of them staging the way that they met, and while I could have believed that, I couldn't find it likely at all that they'd gone so far as to record all this as some fake history to back up that they were ordinary. Chris commented at one point that there were a couple comments close to the very beginning of the recordings that implied they were started fairly early in their shared relationship, that I should watch them later but that it was more important to observe them at the points that they'd gotten more used to each other.

I'd been expecting to hit the sack as soon as Bones and Chris left, but I found myself unable to turn the screen off. I started to impatiently fast-forward through some segments like I was looking for something, laughing when I had to back up one part to the beginning: There was a short but dedicated stop-motion film made out of clay figures that were little ice skaters swarming around a rink made out of craft paper; at the end a title card wished Ken a happy birthday. It wasn't until I finally resigned to my exhaustion and was about to fall asleep later that I realized what was a little pitiful about that, the fact that they would celebrate their "birthdays."

From the jumbled perspective of not knowing much more than how they were made, they had been these cryptic figures in the freak house, and I'd been expecting clues and hints and breaks in whatever show they were putting on. But there was no show at all. There was something all too real in the mere couple hours of what I'd seen so far. It put me on edge more than anything else we'd discovered, and I couldn't put my finger on why.

 

 

The next day I got a comm from Chris to say he was coming over to pick me up only minutes before he arrived, announcing that he needed to go test some things with his gadget guy. About as soon as I had my jacket on I was flopping into his passenger seat, sneering at his music choice and reaching for the controls while he bitched about traffic. It was a short drive and it was only when we were both getting out and heading up to an apartment complex that I asked, "Why aren't we headed to tech aid?"

"Oh, I use this private inventor now. He's only been making the goods for about a year, but Barnett swears by him. Apparently he's the same guy who engineered the energy conservation system for our weather control. Picks up a new hobby every year, apparently."

I made an impressed whistle.

"You still do the geek thing and read about that stuff?" Chris asked; he was squinting at me almost affectionately and he'd unexpectedly already turned to tap the bell comm at our next door.

I shrugged. "Only twice as much as I used to."

"The police folk already?" A voice pepped out of the comm sounding thick with grogginess; he pronounced "police" with what I thought was a Glasgow dialect, and something about the voice made me feel like it wouldn't be a problem if I came in with my cigarette.

"Morning, Scott," Chris grunted, and after a buzz he went right for the door and we let ourselves in.

Mr. Scott's house was extremely cluttered in one room—a colorful assortment ranging from remote control toys to tricorders to something that looked like a sewing machine attached to a hamster wheel—and very clean in the next one. The man himself appeared to us in the type of outfit I'd typically throw on just to run to the store, complete with some woolly arm warmers that made me agree that the place was pretty drafty. He had a loud, straightforward presence but a decidedly handsome cheer to his eyes once he was bothering to shake my hand.

"Montgomery Scott, this is Jim Kirk," Chris said. "He's worked with me before, but not for a while."

"Sounds familiar. I think I've heard a couple stories?" He gave an encouraging pat over the tight handshake and then swiftly turned to swerve around until he snapped his fingers in recognition of a box he was looking for.

"You may have," Chris replied in a way that made me wonder if they were both understating.

One box hissed across the table when Scott knocked it in our direction, and then another. It turned out Scott helped with straight old concealment techniques as well as surveillance technology and I could have pored over the assortment with some interest, but Chris and I had already agreed that having me carry even a miniature weapon wasn't going to be doable except for when it was absolutely necessary. People who are likely to get into more violent places need the more secret agenty stuff, but the most I was going to be doing was concealing a phaser in a jacket whenever I left the house or had an excuse to keep it on. Holsters can get you far if you can swing wearing stuffier clothes, but aside from a somewhat classier variety of outerwear, Will had my preference for basic thin t-shirts and the bulk would show right through.

We got down to the recording hook-up, and what got handed to me was this slim tablet that was only half the size of anything I'd used before. Chris had to explain that I'd been out of the job for years, and Scott went right off.

"Well, then it'll work better than any you've had on you. If you invest in one of the Pills, here..." He picked up one that was a different color. "You're looking at a bigger price, but all of the sound splicing mechanics is in _this_ little box that you've got off-site. So if your guy has any need to flush his gear down the jacks, as they say, you're looking at a replacement that's just basic mic functions rather than the fancier stuff."

I met eyes with Chris. "Nifty, but I don't think this is gonna be that kind of operation."

"Well, it's always good to know when the babies get to live long. You've got plenty of other pros to this one, though. It's got a sensitive range that automatically amplifies voices that are across the room up to thirty feet away. The data stream automatically voice-ID's every person who speaks, and creates a singled recording, so that if Jane and John are talking at the same time, you can splice the recording and listen to only one of 'em. What else, uh, it also picks up some limited life signs? So if you wanted Pike here to pick up on it when your heart rate or anyone else's picks up, it has a range of only about six feet on that, but..."

"Holy woah," I mildly exclaimed, then grinned at Chris. "You've been holding out on me, boss."

"Speak for yourself, DV. Scott, I think we'll take the pretty one."

Chris wanted to test-drive the voice recognition, so I was sent out with a mock-up of the gear strapped under my buttons and carrying my mobile comm next to my ear so that passersby wouldn't think I was bumbling to myself while I tried to nudge by anyone else whose conversation could get picked up. I went three blocks around pretending to have an explosive break-up with someone named Cherise; once that got old I tried to recite poetry, and I had almost made it through a monotone stanza of "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" before Chris finally nagged me to come walking back. By the time I returned to the garage-like work room the two were done discussing the tech details, I got another handshake from Scott, and we were on our way.

On the ride back Chris got a comm call that sent him into a rant about how impossible it was getting to find someone he trusted to run his back-up surveillance while most of his usual team were on the hook until somebody could determine none of them had helped anyone break into the data systems. "At this rate I'll just have to recruit some Terran scout," he grunted with typical zealous NDPD pride.

"Hey, now. I almost was one of those."

Chris just laughed at that, undoubtedly trying to imagine how bored I'd be if that had worked out. Then we got to talking, finally, about some of the interviews he'd had with the residents so far. It was crazy to think I hadn't even watched any of them but we both knew that I would probably get way more out of the home footage and just having him relay anything particularly important to me. He wanted me under in less than a week and there was very little time for me to review everything.

"Um." I was squinting at a few of Pike's notes when I finally pressed, "Will isn't seeing anyone, right?"

It had suddenly dawned on me that I'd taken for granted he would have already checked that out, and was thankful that the look Chris gave me was knowingly assuring. Relationships can be part of covers, sometimes, within reason. This situation was so unprecedented that on the page I could totally get away with it, but no way in hell was I going to consider it. It was one of the many ways in which I had to respect that I was in even less control than I would usually be, that Will Kenley had gone out of my reach some time ago and was no longer mine.

"There were some pretty differing answers, but they all pretty much arrived at no," Chris said, and actually remembered it off his head: "Ken just said no; Gaila said, 'Oh, from time to time?'...Toni seemed to find something funny about the question and said, 'I'm sure he tries.' Danek: 'I don't see how it is relevant to the investigation and can I have a glass of water.'"

I scoffed, as if in some kind of affection.

"That was the same answer he gave to eight or nine other questions, too." Chris shrugged in annoyance. "If Will was getting some it was nothing worth mentioning. Unless of course they're lying."

"Unless," I repeated, the tone conveying the unspoken _That goes for almost everything they say_.

Later that morning when we went through more of the recordings, I finally found Danek. He was obviously in less of them than any of the others as he didn't show up until three or so hours in. It turned out he wasn't so much camera-shy as camera-boring, and possibly didn't go out as often as the others.

Gaila was walking the PADD through the house. The group's was a pretty weird idea of a student home—one of those two-to-three-story flats sandwiched up tall between a couple other apartments, and there was something that made it so theirs I tended to believe it wasn't a temporary choice.

The camera turned into their bright blue scheme kitchen and Danek was there, sitting still. I had to abruptly set my drink down.

Gaila was asking, "Whatcha dooin'?" in a curious sing-song and my mind was ticking up the expectations, the paragraph-long response and steady tone.

Danek replied in a flat mutter, "Reeaading" and the flicker into him being unfamiliar was immediate. I looked harder. His clothes were boring and utilitarian but altogether very locally fashioned. Under the red scarf I recognized from his driver's license, he had his top button undone. He slouched forward a bit onto his elbow. When Gaila asked him something about coming out later for dinner, seemingly having the idea he would be more persuaded if he were on camera, he spoke a bit faster than Spock would, in some indecisive group of thoughts instead of a definite response. There wasn't a whole lot of expression in his voice, but the conversation was too dull for me to feel like I could gauge much.

Except, when Gaila turned to go and insisted to someone in the next room that Danek had submitted to the invitation, I couldn't hear him but wanted to picture him sitting up in a sigh of annoyance:

" _Gaila_ —" The scene was clicked off. Most of the parts with Danek seemed to be cut off like that, a little too short. I was having a hard time sinking my teeth into him.


	3. Chapter 3

By now I'd seen the whole nine hours.

They had apparently inherited a derelict upright piano along with the house; it first appeared in the footage on a bright loud day in their small but open living room. Gaila and Ken sat next to each other doodling along random keys while Toni apparently was the one recording them; the camera went over once to reveal that Will and Danek were on the couch and the armchair on the other side of the room but then neglected to show them again.

"I just feel like the room would look so empty if we sold it." Toni's voice from behind, and the two on the piano bench laughing as they competed over the middle keys, Ken trying to knuckle away Gaila's hand.

"Wait, we're thinking about selling it?" Gaila asked.

"Are we?" Ken said, "I mean, I did assume, since none of us plays."

The two of them, and you could assume Toni too, looked up and across the room at Danek or Will, quite possibly both.

Will said, "Oh, I wasn't putting my foot down about that...If somebody wants to keep it, that's fine. We can always sell it later."

Danek added, "I'm not concerned about the space."

I thought aloud, "That's interesting."

Chris had seemed about to say something about it too: "Yeah, I know, those little 'Let's ask Dad' moments. There's something later on that's kind of like that again."

"Who's on the lease?"

"All on equal shares."

"Huh."

The next day was when Chris told the residents that Will had been revived. We'd known that this was going to be sticky, managing to credibly claim that it was inadvisable for any of them to actually visit him because he was in a mentally fragile condition; Chris came up with the clever lie that Will had been given the opportunity to place a comm to them but had decided to wait once he was told he'd have to be supervised the entire time.

From what I'd heard a couple of them were pretty much chomping at the bit, even expressing some irritation that none of them had Will's power of attorney like that was the most unbelievable mistake. Chris had used that as a reason to ask yet again if they were _sure_ they didn't know how to get in touch with any of Will's folks, and it had earned him the same answer but with an interesting new tone: Instead of one of them vaguely saying they just didn't know anything about his family, Ken had finally calmly given him, "We never talk about any of it," and left it at that.

Late that day Chris arrived at my apartment with a care package the residents had rushed together. It was a light blue plastic basket containing a research PADD, a couple handwritten notes ("I was going to kick your ass if you didn't wake up," Ken professed) and a bag of baked goodies.

"Try the brownies, they're killer," Chris said on his way to my bathroom.

"I think I'll pass." There was no indication of who had made them, but I guessed Will would have known. The second note was a shorter one with a sort of generic but sincere get-well sentiment from Toni. Belatedly I realized that there was a drawing on the other side of the sheet: I guessed it was some historical figure, a guy with a proud pout wearing a jerkin and culottes, rendered in a comic book style. It was pretty good; I may still have it somewhere.

There was nothing from Danek, unless he'd been entrusted with selecting the reading to send along, which I found frustrating. It gave me nothing to work with.

Chris and I would chat about nothing in particular for about five minutes at a time, but generally it was business almost non-stop whenever he came over. By now I had Will's schedules and class notes and unfinished essays strewn all over the data spread on my coffee table, casting looks down now and again to study them. We would watch footage a couple times in a row, three or four times, and during the interesting stuff Chris would pause it every ten seconds or so with something he wanted me to pay attention to.

"See how he turned the joke onto Gaila when she was hounding Ken about his shirt? He makes fun, but he avoids ganging up on people." And later: "There's that thing again, look how she's checking in with Danek about fixing the car. And you can see the girls aren't very physical with him. They both moved over a little when he sat on the couch, with Ken they'd just be bumping knees..."

By the third visit like this Chris was guiltily offering to pay to have dinner delivered, remembering to act like a guest; I almost wanted to tell him I was grateful for the company, happy just to have some noise at the place. Bones hung out with me a few times a week but was usually exhausted in the evening, and I'd had to get used to the type of quiet nights that often spat me out for long aimless walks just so I could get away from the unshakable feeling that a lot of things about my life were grinding to a boring halt.

Back when I was on Murder, Spock and I weren't just with each other most of the day but sometimes late into the night, putting in extra time on a case at his place or just passing the time and then crashing at mine. Other people at the office could hardly miss how we came in together looking hungover, leading to the plaguey assumptions that we were sleeping with each other. Once Spock had tersely made it known he didn't appreciate the other officers perpetuating rumors that could potentially get the two of us fired or at least split up, they'd realized it wasn't true, and moved on to the jokes about our "slumber parties" which managed in their implications to be just as snide. I had hated that crap at the time, but I almost missed being constantly parodied by the gossip at that godforsaken office, if only because it had meant that there was something quietly remarkable in my life.

On the screen now all five were in the car, and for much of this part it was too dark for me to make out who was even sitting where, but the person holding the cam was in the middle back seat and it was easiest to make out Danek's profile in the driver's seat.

Toni's voice to one side: "I mean, it's hard for me to take Korrison seriously when he's so synonymous with it, it's like he literally writes the music just for skating..."

"Oh, no, he does." Ken. "It's like practically manufactured for that like, 'Oh, I heard you guys like roaring choirs for your ice prancing, so...'"

Gaila laughed—she had to be behind the camera—and Toni said, "So you didn't really like it either?"

"No, I just don't care enough to push it, so we use that stuff all the time. But I swear, the first time we did the routine to the music, that one part with the Latin comes in...I almost dropped Kara on her ass cause I started laughing."

Will appeared to be looking back from shotgun while Gaila giggled darkly. "I wasn't going to say anything..."

Gaila interrupted, "You've been saying since forever how much you hate the music!"

"Ah," Ken mock-accused, "so _that's_ why you had a study group last time."

"Aw, _Ken_."

"I'm just playing."

Danek chipped in, "You all have to understand that Will has the musical preferences of a Nietzschean philosopher, which is somewhat limiting in itself."

There was one of those stunned moments of no one understanding before Will seemed to remember something it referenced, and abruptly let out into a low laugh that wouldn't quit, his head thunking back against the rest.

"I don't get it," Toni said.

"He means that Will only likes really old music."

"That isn't what I meant," Danek said, a calm note of aloof amusement in his voice.

A few seconds after that it became obvious Will was trying to figure out what had happened to his PADD, sending everyone in the back into a fit until he saw the camera trained on him, scoffed and held out his hand with a mild look of chagrin.

A moment later I curiously asked, "What do you know about Sulu?"

"You know I'm not supposed to tell you."

I gave Chris an expression of _You're not actually going to give me that?_ He relented pretty quickly, setting down the drink he'd been nursing with a slightly impish smile.

"Fine. Well, I've never met him but he's one of Barnett's, and pretty obviously his favorite. This kid..." Chris shook his head in a bewildered way. "He knows over half a dozen types of combat, which is probably what got him the job at a young age. He's been doing this _hardcore_ gig for several years over in Chainley; he started with this gang that has every reason to be paranoid, most of the time not even being able to carry a gun because of the weird seniority systems those syndicates have. Apparently this alias got shelved when his cover got burned a few years back and he managed to _krav maga_ his way out of a little confab that went really bloody."

"Damn," I exclaimed.

"Cigarette."

I grunted in frustration at the reminder, adjusted the way I was holding my smoke; Will always tucks his cigarette between his pinky and fourth finger as if he's in the habit of wanting to free up the rest of his hand.

"He should have been passing out in relief that he was still alive, but he didn't even take a _break_ , really. He went to California to spend the holidays with his parents and was back in a week requesting a spot in the rival gang." I started to laugh, and he added, "Yeah, I imagine the two of you would get along."

It made me feel weird to realize how glad I was he'd said that. Sulu sounded like the type of undercover who was born for the job, a person Chris may have once had hopes I would turn out to be. It takes getting into some really dark stuff to tell the stark difference between Undercover and everyone else, but once you do it's plain as day that they're the type of people who will do virtually anything—they'll walk through fire, light up their whole lives and throw them away like a grenade if that's what it takes to get their big villain. I have felt like that guy from time to time, but I didn't want it to become my whole life.

For a long time after I transferred out of UCD, Chris and I had awkwardly lost touch for a while when I'd been unable to get rid of the impression that I'd let him down. It's generally impossible for people to make me feel much of anything about disappointing anybody if I'm sure that I'm doing what I want to do; I didn't like to go near the reason that Chris was one of the exceptions when I wasn't even entirely sure where I stood with him outside of work.

We took a break when Bones gave me a call; I'd asked him to give me a good run-down of how to act post-coma with a side of amnesia. Will was supposed to have no memory of what had happened after he ate dinner that night, which would make it easy for me to shrug and tell them I'd had no idea what I was even doing on that part of town, much less what my attacker had looked like. Chris and I wanted to think this experience would make Will at least a bit jumpy, but only because we could use a touch of trauma to our advantage.

Shortly after I hung up, Chris conversationally asked me how long Bones and I had been friends.

"Hmm, we would've met maybe four months after I transferred...Why?"

"Just wondering. I hadn't known until recently you two were even close."

"Ah. Yeah, I don't know what I'd do without the guy."

We didn't say anything for a couple minutes while I was trying to decipher this weird note-taking system Will had been using in one of his electives. Eventually I heard Chris say, "Jim, listen."

I looked up.

"I didn't want to have to bring this up, but the fact is, I really didn't know about it until after I'd already cooked up this whole idea. Though I should've suspected, with how things went the night the body was found, and some things I noticed afterwards..." He sighed. "McCoy told me that you and Spock had some huge falling-out?"

My eyes want back down to the notes. After a couple seconds I neutrally nodded, shrugged. "It's true."

"I know you've probably already worked out whether it's going to be a problem, but I've got to check in. That's his clone in there, and if it makes things harder..."

"It's a non-issue. Danek isn't Spock. I know that," I insisted, then shrugged again. "If anything, it'll make it easier. You know, keep things in perspective."

I don't think Chris thought for a second that what he was getting on the surface was everything I could have said, but he was able to confirm that I'd thought about it. He considered my response for only a second before he decided he believed me, nodded and left it alone.

 

 

"Who's Susan Creevey?"

"Professor of Economics, I have her on Tuesdays and Thursdays at two, room 305 at Dillinger Hall."

"What do you do after class on Thursdays?"

"Thursday is my night to cook. Danek has an evening lecture and Gaila usually drops him off so she can take the car to a study group. If she's back early enough Ken and I will sometimes take the car to pick up Danek and get something at the bakery on the way back."

"How are you doing in Absurdist Lit?"

"It's the only class I'm not acing, but I should have my grade pulled up if I cram for the next exam."

"Wednesday."

"Lit at nine, lunch with the girls, Klingon Civil Wars at noon."

"John Alexie."

"My partner on my economics presentation, which is about mercantilism of pre-contact Earth."

"How do you like Professor Danes?"

"Quite a lot, as a person. Gaila would say he doesn't challenge us enough."

"How early do you wake up?"

"I'm always up between seven and eight, but I'm slow in the morning. On the weekends I sleep in only about an hour longer than that, even when I drink."

"Good." Chris looked over. "Cigarette."

" _Shit_."

 

 

"Since when do you smoke Slatroys?" Bones asked.

"I don't. Will does. I've got to break in a packet."

Bones let out a smirking sigh. We'd had this conversation before: "I think the whole subculture of Slatroys is mostly in your head, Jim."

"No, it's not. The only people on this planet who smoke who aren't an active part of 'addiction culture,' are cops, and people who smoke Slatroys."

"Why cops?"

"It's currency," Chris submitted. "Gets you far in an interrogation."

"Anyway, I've never met anyone who smoked Slats who wasn't pretentious as hell," I complained. "I am probably the first cop in history to ever put one in my mouth, that's for sure."

"Well, considering cigarettes are totally domestic, and we could use more officers..."

"You know what, Bones, I don't even know how I'm going to survive without your sass for...God knows how long."

"You should at least be happy Will smokes at all," Chris put in.

"Why?" Bones said, "He could use a reason to get off it."

"I'm not addicted," I protested. "I'll go weeks without it if I'm not stressed. It relaxes me."

In an unusual throw of pure deadpan, Bones nodded and said, "Well, that explains why you're so relaxed all the time." Chris wasn't able to tamper down his laugh before it got out, and I glared at both of them.

"I don't know why you get on this anyway. I'm not sure if you've heard, but we can cure cancer now," I said with lilting sarcasm.

Bones grumbled, "We can cure Orion sting fever too, but I'm not about to lick the backside of a—"

Chris cleared his throat loudly as he noticed the server approaching.

It was lunch at The Patio, the diner close to senior headquarters which became something of the unofficial cop dive a while back. We were helped by a sweet-looking waitress who distractedly took our drink orders, and a minute after she walked away Chris said, "I think Will could get her number."

Bones thought Chris was kidding, but I just winked at him and sat up straighter, thinking fast.

Chris was throwing me into a tricky spot: We both had seen that Will's style of flirting was very different from mine. I tended to be pretty direct and verbal about things so that I could just get accepted or shut down and move on, but Gaila had recorded him working his more gentlemanly magic on some store owner in the process of getting a picture of this huge sculpture they'd been really fascinated by, and Will had definitely been the type to convey it all in an expression. I generally felt like I had no idea how to do that without it coming off creepy, but surely I could learn a couple things from him. When the server came by again I stopped her with, "Excuse me, ma'am."

I'd talked like we were in a library, and she stepped in closer to our table.

"Actually, I just wanted to tell you..." I was enunciating and pacing my words in what Bones probably thought was a completely unrecognizable way; Will spoke in everyday speech the way I only spoke when I was in the same room as a judge. "I come here often, so I know that you're new. I don't want to make you self-conscious, but I thought I should warn you: That elderly couple you're waiting on—the lady who came in with the yellow gloves? Every single time they come in here, the husband orders the tuna salad and doesn't specify that he wants it on rye, and then complains when they bring it to him on wheat, so if I were you I'd just go with the rye."

"Oh." The server flinched into a laughing little smile; I was hitting her full force with what I hoped was the kind of grin that was charming in how unselfconscious it was, as if I didn't realize at all that I was looking a few seconds too long. She double took me and said, "Thanks."

"Ah, don't mention it. What's your name?"

"Joan. And yeah, you're right, I started just yesterday."

"I look forward to seeing you here, then. Detective Kirk. Call me Jim." It felt parodying, using my own name as I reached out to give her one of those serious squeezes for handshakes. I thought I heard Bones spluttering a suppressed laugh into some of his drink.

She said, "Nice to meet you," and I nodded and she went off. I got back out of character, slouching a little and yanking one of our appetizers off of the table, and then gave a sly grin to Chris and Bones.

Fifteen minutes later when my PADD lit up with my updated tab, it had a memo attached. It was a comm number with a 'J' next to it. I slid it over for Chris to see without any comment. He looked down, up, and then distantly considered for a moment before he said, "I'm putting you in tomorrow night."

It shocked me a little. I pressed my fist over my mouth and then slapped the table after a second, giddily hissing some curse.

Bones finished off his burger and looked generally unreadable for the rest of the day, until he settled for offering to take me out for a congratulatory drink.

He was squinting at me over his beer as he remembered to ask, "Was that even true? About the sandwich ordeal?"

I smirked. "Sort of. I've seen it happen once."

He laughed shortly. "Isn't that kinda cheating?"

"Nah. It would have been if I'd never seen them before in my life. But the best lies are like that. It's harder to dress up absolutes."

He considered me for a second. "It's crazy to think that I never asked you much about your undercover days, now that we've come back to it. I'd never thought much of it until lately."

I stretched my arm across the back of the booth, shrugged. "I don't know if you picked up on it or not, but I never really liked to talk about it that much."

"Yeah, I guess." Bones twisted his mouth a bit thoughtfully. "I hope this question doesn't rub you the wrong way."

"What?"

"You sort of...well, you've got to be pretty good at fooling people, obviously. You even kind of have to manipulate them, and you being so good at it...for some reason it's not something I ever pictured." He was hesitating. "I guess I'm just curious, have you always worked people like that just to get what you need? Not in any big way, just some harmless little white lying?"

I blinked, taking a while to say anything in reply. "You mean just like any day? Not when I'm at work?"

Bones grimaced, looking off to the side. "You're pissed."

"No. I mean, I don't know..." I shifted in my seat. I was thinking of all the shortcuts I had for changing subjects, brushing off jokes, making people feel safe by fibbing that what they're reading is my favorite author, making them on edge with the vaguest possible implications...I laughed uncomfortably. Maybe I was pissed. "Jesus. You know how I feel about people like that, why would you say that?"

Bones looked alarmed. "Hey, I didn't mean it like getting your way is ever a bad thing. I just mean...You've always had a way of influencing people to do what's right even when you're not in charge, or sometimes you sort of...get the tension out of a room by saying just the right thing. I wondered if that was something you picked up doing this stuff. That's all."

"Oh." I wore a little cringe now, my hand trying to wave off the tightness in the air. "I don't know, my mind just went off somewhere you totally didn't mean to send me. Sorry."

Bones was fixing me with a muted shock when I looked directly at him. "...What, were you thinking about Sarah March?"

"Change the subject," I said predictably, then bitterly muttered, "before I make you want to change it."

"Jim," Bones said, and it was in a tired whine. A moment passed in silence.

I leaned back and sighed heavily. "Man, I'm sorry. This is the last we're gonna see of each other before I start and I'm being an asshole. I wasn't even feeling wound up about it until now."

Bones gave some impatiently forgiving gesture and took a long swig of his drink. After a few seconds he curiously thought to ask, "So what's Danek like?"

He looked uncertain about whether it was even a safe topic, but I just shrugged. "He's definitely sometimes expressive, which is weird, but it's not like anyone could pull him into a police station for not seeming Vulcan enough when his ID claims he was raised there. But he kind of talks like he walked out of the Victorian era sometimes. I guess he's what you'd expect from a geeky guy with the capacity to hold a huge vocabulary."

"Except that you just described yourself there."

"Why do people always say that? I'm not a geek."

"Keep telling yourself that."

"Fuck you. Cops aren't geeks." But I was laughing, reaching my glass out for a wordless toast.

Bones refused to hug me or anything when we split up later, saying he didn't need to feel like I was "going off to fucking war." He reminded me that I could give him a call any time I got the chance and we left each other at the transport station.

I should have been exhausted by the time I got home, but I could hardly sleep. I did some farewell organizing of my apartment before making myself take a sleep aid and get in a few hours. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been so excited about anything.

 

 

Chris was waiting for me and I was in the bathroom putting on Will's new button-up over the double-checked and checked-again surveillance kit. It hadn't taken more than parting my hair just right to get it to look like Will's softer, less styled look. When I buttoned the last button of the shirt and picked up the canvas work jacket and held it over my shoulder, I looked in the mirror again and was caught by what I saw for a moment. I took in a deep breath and then took a Slatroy out of the weathered-in pocket pack and nudged it behind my ear. As if that was the final touch of some long-labored work, I stopped going over the details and nuances and relaxed into my instincts, turned off the light and emerged to meet Chris with my lips crooking up slightly.

His eyebrows hopped up briefly in an almost teasing return of the smile. "You're expected in about half an hour, so, ready when you are."

I had my officer's ID nudged into a hidden inner pocket of Will's wallet, but I handed over my personal comm and my house chip to Chris, who tucked them safely into his jacket.

I gave a brief look around my apartment, trying to remember if there was anything else I needed to take care of. The place felt cold and indifferent to my departure. I wondered if it would feel the same whenever I finally got back.

I nodded. "Ready."

 

 

I'd learned a long time before I was even on undercover to recognize when I have no room to get nervous. Of course I was just a little bit, but I was making sure to channel it just right. My entire mind and body were stretching and flexing as if ready to do some kind of acrobatic stunt, feeling mentally through the touchstones of all the times I'd practiced the way Will walks and talks and smirks.

Mostly what I was worried about was making sure my knee didn't bob up and down like it used to when I was jogging my memory in class exams; Will ran at a lower speed than I did, and it was all "Think fast—but not too fast."

We were halfway there when Chris explained, "I've got my rookie on you for third shift, but I'll be listening in as often as I can. If you get into trouble and it's nothing we can hear, make some comment that your head hurts. Just make sure that if you actually do get a headache you keep your mouth shut about it."

"Yes sir."

There was nothing much left to say; I complained about Chris' music again almost for the rest of the ride, imitating one of the singers to make him lighten up as if he was the one with all the nerves. It was the last time Chris was able to smile when it was just knowingly for me; we were pulling up close enough to be in character, and his face fell to a solemn frown and he just said, "Deep breath."

The place looked somehow smaller in real life than in the photos Chris had provided, and there were some details I hadn't noticed before: the upstairs loft had these gauzy white curtains that gave the room beyond some innocently young, non-secretive personality. The narrow white stretch of the building looked well taken care of from the outside, the door painted a subtle pastel hue. It had the surreal beauty of all the spotlessly kept houses I'd been trained to see as a little too perfect, having found too many skeletons underneath.

Chris got out faster than me in my tired slip out of the driver's side, and even though I vaguely observed the motion of someone banging right out of the front door, I didn't move as if I had while he came around and handed me my small suitcase from the back seat.

"Thank you for everything, Mr. Pike." I reached out my hand for him to shake.

"You be sure to look after yourself. Don't hesitate to comm if you remember anything or have any questions, you hear?"

Of course I'm going to tell you that it all seemed to happen very fast. It was a flash of footsteps pattering down the short drive and a little squeak of excitement, a tall explosion of soft hair as a pair of green arms came squeezing tightly up around my shoulders.

There was a catapulting snap in the air; I felt some motion moving through me as when something breakable goes flipping off a table and then spins and lands with an improbable clap safely on its head, intact. I reached my arms up and wrapped them around Gaila.


	4. Chapter 4

Gaila might have held on until I fell over if I hadn't complained, "Ow ow ow," making her pull back with an apologetic frown as I felt vaguely below my ribs. I made as if to distract her from that by moving to pick up my suitcase just as Chris was pulling out, and she eagerly offered to get it for me, wiping under her eyes and doing a little cursing exhale.

"Everyone's freaking out in the kitchen or something," Gaila grunted as we got up to the porch. "Do you even know you're early?"

The old-fashioned screen door kicked open again and Ken was yelling behind him, "He's here!" I could see right through to the narrow foyer and the kitchen beyond, somebody moving over the stove. I exchanged grins with Ken and he was also clapping his arms around me for a short time, muttering a simple "Hey, you."

After that it was a flurry of Toni yelling something inside excitedly and Gaila and Ken resuming some previous exchange—"I just did it, okay, no whining," Ken was saying—until we were all migrated into the kitchen and Toni was stopping between an aloof series of movements to squeeze one of my arms and tip up to give me a firm kiss on the cheek.

Everyone seemed to become a spectator when I became aware of Danek on the other end of the kitchen. He was leaning against the sink with his arms crossed, looking me up and down, and I could feel the others looking between us as I smiled weakly.

I said, "Hey."

One side of his mouth crooked up. "How are you feeling?" I had always really liked that voice, the way it was deep and sort of young at once; from Danek there was a different rhythm to it, but the pitch-perfect likeness, hearing it in person rather than on the recordings, felt electric.

"I'm just fine."

"Will," Toni finally interrupted, "what do you want for dinner? We'll do anything you want."

"Oh..." I put on an indifferent pout. "Whatever's around is fine."

I shrugged, but Gaila and Toni exchanged these suspicious looks, lips all pursed.

"He's looking very teriyaki to me," Gaila considered, and then Toni was giving me a playful deciphering look.

"Yeah," she agreed.

"Coming right up," Gaila said, clapping her hand over my opening mouth, as across the room Danek started getting things out of cabinets as if he was anxious to have something to do with his hands. Gaila pivoted me around her and Ken, urging, "Now go sit down, babe. You look seriously beat."

Dinner in the living room was pretty decent teriyaki chicken with some dessert Gaila had already made that was apparently also a favorite of Will's, along with an old samurai movie clanging on the screen. No one asked me so much as how bad the hospital food was, and I was a little intrigued by how they were handling it, though I knew it was still early. Chris and I had both known their interview behaviors could hardly be very telling; they'd all been tactful to some degree in that environment even if Danek had been far and away the most difficult to analyze.

Because of the detachment, anyway, I was able to keep things quiet that first night. If anyone thought I seemed more distracted than was normal or made sense to them, they hid it gracefully. I did ask Gaila a couple questions about our shared class; Danek was sitting next to her at the time, and I thought he seemed to have a look of relieved recognition that I would start asking about that already. From Gaila's vague answer about how she'd had to borrow some notes from someone else and would send them along to me, I made a note to ask Chris what everyone's attendance had been like only just recently. From the records I'd seen, it wasn't like Gaila to skip class often.

If what I was perceiving as a façade was in fact that, they all smoothly carried it to their rooms when they dismissed themselves to bed later. The goodnights were very casual; in Ken's case it was nothing more than a kind of teasing nudge to my leg as he passed by to go upstairs, and Toni and Gaila followed later with yawns and lazy waves after Gaila hugged me once more, absorbed in some talk they were having about giving rides tomorrow. Danek was rearranging something in the kitchen and I decided to retreat to Will's bedroom but leave the door ajar. I was looking busy hanging up some clothes when I heard a brief couple knocks; it was Danek, already changed into a pair of basic pajamas.

"I wanted to ask you alone," he said with a tiredly amused expression, "because the others won't have you going back to class tomorrow and I also think you should have the time to relax...but I have a meeting scheduled with Professor Nichols and he said that if you wanted to accompany me to make up for the one you missed...I figured you wouldn't like to stay in _all_ of the day."

He was comfortably leaning his shoulder into the door frame and I'd stopped up closer to the door, thoughtfully running my hair off my face. "Oh, definitely not. Yeah, I'll come. I was even looking over my thesis notes last night at the hospital, so, sure."

It might have been iffy to mention anything about the recovery; my only assignment for the first several days or so was to not fuck up until Chris was completely satisfied I was in, so I shouldn't have been pushing on any tense topics. But it was useful that from Danek's reaction he didn't necessarily want to evade the subject, even if he'd had yet to address it directly, and still didn't then. "Good. We're scheduled for six in the evening, so don't be on a walk."

I nodded, smiling. "I'll be here."

My starting to turn away then was mostly fishing for what Danek would do; I got it when he simply said, "Will..."

I pivoted back into the doorway and Danek had hardly moved. He was looking at me with a half-smile and a new and gentle gravity in his eyes. After a hesitance, he gave a motion that could have been a shrug. "Welcome home."

Of course I had addressed the issue of touch telepathy with Chris at some point, but when I brought it up he refused to be concerned about it. _Danek doesn't seem to get feely all that much, but if he does, and you can't get some serious method acting on, the one important thing is to not panic. If you're uncomfortable or you're confused, let him blame it on the trauma, let him make up his own explanation, and know that if he seems suspicious you can use that too. As long as you don't totally freak out on him, you'll be fine._

At a different time, a hug might have sent my heart running a bit faster, but it happened in a fluid motion where it was actually hard to place who had initiated it. Danek's arms wrapped around mine and it was a brotherly pull, close in the comfortable lean of weight and his chin finding a bed on my shoulder. I returned that same loose squeeze, one hand going assuringly for his upper back. I didn't have to remind myself he couldn't sense what I was thinking rather than just feeling, because I wasn't really thinking much at all.

It was over after a pretty short time, and then Danek, looking like he'd settled into a more solid relief, backed up and said, "Goodnight, Will."

"'night."

Once I was alone I pulled the suitcase from where it had been set by the door and tossed it onto the bed, trying to will the humming of the house into that sensical line between voices and phantom noises. Perhaps still having enough stage fright that I'd prefer no one else to come knocking, I took my time with unzipping and unpacking so that the rustling wouldn't make much noise.

Behind the compartment in the case lid that only held a few pairs of underwear, there was an additional hidden zipper. I opened it and slid out my second firearm, my usual larger phaser. Looking around the room, I settled on the far underside of Will's desk, ripped off a length of tape from the roll I had in my bag and attached it under the desktop.

For a second I stayed under there on my back, idly listening to the murmurs I'd discerned from upstairs. I picked up a vague whisper of two people talking—I thought maybe it was Gaila and Ken—and it reached me as grave and hushed, until one of them coughed into a giggle. After that the voices were more staggered, and by the time I'd gotten into sweatpants and a t-shirt, they'd dissolved.

I flicked off the light and slipped under Will's covers and got into his bed and I lay there for a long time, listening anxiously as if I was waiting for the house to start snoring, like I didn't want it to catch me asleep. But there was another presence to it, the pleasant scent still emanating from the kitchen close to the bedrooms, perfect warmth of the comforter clouding and settling in around my body. When I did sleep, I slept better than I had in a very long time.

 

 

In the morning I picked up that most of the residents rose early; I figured Will had an excuse to oversleep a bit so it didn't concern me that when I made myself appear in the kitchen Danek and Gaila were already pinching bagles out of the toaster, responding to some anxious calls from Toni who was having a hard time finding one of her PADDs. She appeared at the threshold of the kitchen with her jacket on and gave me a little smile; I interrupted what she might have been about to say: "The brown one? I saw it next to the comm screen."

"Oh, oh," she exited again, her rushed flurry making Danek mumble something to himself I didn't pick up on. I was at the refrigerator and jumped a little when Gaila playfully dug her hands into my shoulders, giving a massaging squeeze.

"We got that tea you like. Finish up all the leftovers if you want." I touched her wrist in a gesture of appreciation as she wrapped her arms around my ribs, rocking me exaggeratedly back and forth for only a couple seconds and then getting gone.

Gaila was on her way to her part-time job at the coffee shop a few blocks away; Toni and Danek had a class at the same time, and were late, judging from how Toni entered the kitchen and asked, "Why aren't you in the car?"

"Why aren't _you_?" Danek returned, giving me a look over what he'd been reading while waiting for her. I just smiled and said some generic goodbye to them, and sat down at the kitchen table to blow on a cup of coffee I'd just prepared. I idly read a few lines of the news off Ken's PADD he'd abandoned before leaving much earlier, waiting till I heard the click of the front door, the dull tapping of the car doors closing even farther away. I was on my feet as soon as the engine started.

Back in Will's room I pulled the suitcase out again from under the bed, and got out the bug kit I had stowed in the shaving bag.

The implements are usually these black button-shaped devices and were made to be unremarkable-looking, something you could easily assume was supposed to be part of a piece of furniture. Chris had decided to forgo bugging the living room area, perhaps assuming nothing much candid that I would miss happened over movies and study sessions. The only room he wanted to monitor was the loft.

The house had three floors, consisting of a tiny basement I looked and discovered had been plastered with shelves after shelves of old books that were probably worth a fortune; then the main floor with the kitchen connected to the small living room and the crammed hallways starting under the stairs and leading to Will and Danek's rooms; and an upstairs loft that the other three all shared.

The disproportionate rooming situation seemed a little odd, but the loft turned out to feel like a place where I could hypothetically easily bear living with two other people. One area with a bunk bed was sequestered away from someone else's space with a short decorative screen, but I thought the layout could have been done differently if its habitants were all that conscious about privacy. A pair of sneakers that looked to be Gaila's size had been fastened onto the feet of a big stuffed panda for somebody's laugh. There was a board above the computer space that held a lot of memorabilia, brochures and ticket stubs.

Nothing in the room looked like something I couldn't be convinced had been bought in the last year. There were photos sitting around, but none of them showed anything beyond the typical college life or even anything explicitly from outside of New Dublin. I had an automatic habit of looking for history and biography when I entered somebody's space, even when it was personal rather than professional curiosity. What may not have been noted at all by someone else felt like a white-walled and slightly cold lack of something that should have been essential.

I quickly decided to bug the computer space, activating the chip so that it lit up in one blink of confirmation and then placing it where it might pass for some extension of the central comm system hooked up to the computer screen. I made a face about it, having never done a job where we tapped anybody's place like this, but I had to make my peace with it, telling myself at least that in all likelihood no one was going to be bringing home a date to this room. Terran law enforcement is more limited when it comes to these kinds of things, which I tend to forget about until my mom makes disapproving comments about the long leashes we're kept on, "Not that you're not one of the good eggs, honey." She rather transparently hates a lot of our policies, along with the cigarettes, the kill-only guns, the messy currency, and just about everything else about New Dublin.

Once I was back downstairs I was tempted to scope out Danek's room, but instead I checked out the back yard. The group lived somewhere that was almost unreasonably far from their university, at the fringes where even though the places still looked nice, you were uncomfortably close to a very bad part of town.

Brynock Place was a somewhat upper middle class villa where the homes formed a horseshoe around a medium-sized park. It was a great park, heavily wooded as if in imitation of ND's innermost forest areas, but farther in it was also somewhere you'd be nervous to come across somebody else at one in the morning. The homes that were way off lining the other side of the park were a much louder type of living entirely. It would make a lot of people nervous; I couldn't help but admire anyone with apparent indifference about it.

I took a walk many paces in before I pulled out Will's comm and called Chris.

"How's life at the dollhouse?" he asked when he answered after only one alert.

"Just fine," I said. "Pretty little place. Everyone's gone, I bugged the upstairs, I don't know if anyone's tuned on yet..."

"I was just there and told Boyd you might be doing that soon. Well done."

"Have you listened to last night?"

"Danek hugged you, didn't he?"

"Yeah." I laughed. "I kept it cool, it's fine."

"I'm more concerned that you mentioned—"

"I know. He wasn't that sensitive about that, but I'll keep it toned down."

"Alright. And you never know, he might be the one to bring it up. After a point, not being curious is way weirder than nothing."

I made a hum noise. "Depends."

"Well, we'll save it for your one-week report. Go make the house look lived-in."

"Take it easy."

"Later."

I really didn't have anything to do for the rest of my alone time besides put some further study on Will's notes. Compared to some of the other cumbersome things I've had to do for undercover it was not all that boring, when it wasn't a pain in the ass trying to decipher his scribbles. Will and I didn't really have the same writing, but if I hadn't given up on cursive when everyone told me it looked like a bunch of nothing, it's hard to say if there wouldn't have been a kinship. Where he bothered to translate himself into typed notes, a step he'd seemed to take when he had his thoughts in a less preliminary stage, a lot of his ideas felt tragically unsalvageable.

A couple hours after lunch Gaila came in from her shift, doing nothing much more than groaning an expression of her exhaustion into my shoulder when she sat down next to me. "Hey," I said, tipping my head in on hers for a second and catching the scent of her shampoo. She eventually got out of her respite, complaining vaguely about how much she needed to do that night, and I offered to help her with some of the Civil Wars dates.

"No, no." She was getting up. "You have all this catching up to worry about, don't worry about me."

"Well, fine," I said, lazily mock-huffy.

"You should be worrying about nothing but you. Unless you're asking me to help _you_ study," she said, smiling. "Which you're not. I can see why you're starting to think about being a teacher."

We hadn't come across that; I'd gave no real thought at all to Will having those kinds of aspirations for his life. Before I could start wondering about it I said, "The problem is I'd have so little patience for the mediocre students. It's more fun with you."

"They'd put you with the best, I'm sure."

"And there's less to teach the best. I'd want the second best," I said wryly.

"Only the second best for Professor Kenley," she said with a dry little giggle, squinting as she reached to un-snag one of her curls from a long earring. "By the way, your cover's blown. We know about your super-secret Nichols meeting. He mentioned it to Toni in the hallway while she was on lunch, so you don't need to tip-toe away with Danek later. It's not like we're all trying to babysit you, anyway."

I wondered if somebody on the other side of the mic had blinked at the cover idiom. "Who says it's a secret?" I said with playful coyness.

"Nichols, apparently. 'Danek said not to mention this to you, but...' He just wanted to ask us how you're doing and it slipped that he's expecting to see you today." She shook her head and abruptly commented, "Jeez, he is a silly big thing sometimes."

"Danek? Or Nichols?" I got up to get something to eat. She just gave me a light whack on the arm.

"You two and your little arbitrary secrets, that's all," she said. "I'll be surprised if I ever find out you've been keeping something from us that actually means much of anything."

 

 

"Explain to me what direction you're taking from the lit angle?"

"Well, the subject of that research is trying to go with the assumption that virtually all of the literature that was written pre-first contact on Earth was completely socially irrelevant following contact with alien life..."

"Okay." Professor Nichols sat back in his office chair, cracking a slow smile. "No, I thought you were...Explain more about that?"

"Basically, there were two somewhat distinct genres, between science fiction and fantasy, before Terrans knew they weren't alone in the universe. And the entire amount of responsibility in writing about extraterrestrials very abruptly changed. If you look at pretty much all of the pre-contact sci-fi that deals with aliens, at the most what you get is simply an allegory for domestic oppression. It's never really something that effectively treats alien races as a variant of humanity in their own right rather than as an accessory to humans as the defining example of ideal sentience."

"So, you're almost arguing that it's sort of...pre-appropriating?" Nichols looked like he was kind of enjoying how confused he was. I'd forgotten what it was like to put that look on an instructor's face.

"Even when the fiction is about aliens, it's still about Terrans; when it's about how terrible Terrans are to aliens, it's still about Terrans," I said with a nod. "Following first contact, there should have immediately been a distinction that lumped in sci-fi that still treated extraterrestrials as fiction with the rest of fantasy, or at least as a subdivision of science fiction, but the distinction isn't really made, and as a result we have this whole mess of literature that gets put into historical relevance without much of any knowledge of how ignorant it is...especially considering that authors _were_ appropriating the very first limited information they got about Vulcan and were just making stuff up about it in books which were getting published as fiction but still having kind of a problematic influence..."

He motioned for me to go on. Next to me Danek tapped my elbow and I managed to realize he wanted a swig out of my water bottle, almost straying from my train of thought.

"I'm comparing it to the current intellectual treatment of artificial intelligence, and also transhumanism to some degree. Sorry, here," I mumbled to Danek, finally managing to hand the bottle over from the other side of my chair. "Um, just proposing that there's a lot of imaginative theories which are possibly underestimated in the assumption that they'll never come to fruition...So in essence I'm suggesting that history may or may not repeat itself in that sense of how fiction follows history, because the problems with it the first time around were never treated with as much respect as they could have been."

"Good." Nichols nodded. "Good. Uh, there was this one series of novels that I've heard was written before first contact, but was still being written afterwards, it's by somebody named...Rubaya?..."

"The Animon Chronicles," I said. "I've read them all."

"See, I'm not even worried about you. That does make this something like the third time you've changed your focus just by a bit..."

Danek said, "You should be used to Will doing that by now," his voice softy humored, and Nichols laughed.

"Yeah, I know. And yours, Danek...I was looking over what you sent me last night, and it all looks good. You've really kept up with the topic _extremely_ well, and, hell, I can answer any questions you've got, but overall I've got no concerns. Great work."

"Thank you, professor." Danek's eyes shifted to look over his notes a second time, a bloom of warmth to his eyes as he bit his lip once; it had become obvious throughout the meeting that Danek greatly admired Nichols, and it was pretty damn endearing. He'd made about half a dozen little unneeded adjustments to his scarf since we'd sat down.

I was observing everything Danek did as closely as I'd paid attention to him in Will's recordings; it was harder when I had to only glance and pretend it was all second nature, but I'd gotten so comparatively little to go on with him and it felt like I was still studying. When we finished up the meeting I figured we'd go and wait for Ken to get out of his evening class, and sure enough he went automatically in the direction of the central courtyard where he idled and then leaned his hands into a decorative stone banister that lined around a little garden in front of an administration building. I put my bag down and leaned so that I was half-sitting against it.

There was low student traffic, but I felt like one of the people we passed gave me a double take. Danek had started talking then, asking me a couple things about my paper; I got the impression that it was basically small talk. I couldn't shake off this idea I had that he was skirting around getting into anything deep, like the time just wasn't right. Just then, while we were waiting for Ken, I got the tiniest hint about that, but it made no sense to me.

We had briefly fallen into a silence when some kids started kicking a ball around in the grassy expanse and it gave our eyes something to trace after for a couple unconscious moments; then I felt Danek's eyes looking at me askance, and met them expectantly.

He asked, "Are you alright?"

The air felt a bit heavier as I looked down at my shoes, giving a not-completely-there nervous grin. I looked back over at him. "Sure."

Danek turned away so that we were facing the same direction, forming that different kind of union that happens when you share the viewed horizon rather than the simpler joint of direct glances; I felt like I could feel him telling himself to relax.

"I really am," I added quietly, then shrugged. "This whole thing just feels really crazy."

He seemed to take the breath to say something but then take quite a while to say it. "I didn't look at the chip."

I could envision Chris somewhere on the other edge of this, cocking a slow brow and sitting forward; I was blanking completely but only got in a hint of a look before Danek practically interrupted.

"It would have been foolish if I had, but I thought you might have been worrying about it."

"No," I said with casual confidence. "Not really."

The corners of his lips twitched up.

A cheery few notes were whistled from off to the right, and Ken was walking up with his boots dragging a little tiredly on the pavement. "Let's call it boys' night for dinner, guys, I am so damn hungry."

I suggested, "Jillian's?" It was close by and somebody in the interviews had mentioned it was a frequent spot. They both agreed and we were there within minutes. The waiter obviously recognized me as soon as we sat down.

"Hey, hey, hey, _hey_." The server, whose name was Jek judging by a holler from behind the front counter, was a mixed Orion who had long hair in a ponytail, extremely handsome features, and a name tag that had JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH painstakingly written on it. "William's back."

"'lo," I said mildly.

"Hey, what do they call them? Beverages?" Ken suggested with a teasing gesture of shooing him away.

He returned with everyone's preferred drinks without having to ask, then leaned down in my direction. "They said you had like amnesia or something."

"Jek," Danek said, warningly.

"It's okay," I said with a wave toward Danek and Ken. "I don't remember what happened and I'm more or less glad I don't, but anyway I don't really want to talk about it."

"Sure, sorry. I'm just glad to see you're alright." He walked off, pausing to throw over his shoulder, "I missed your tips."

The rest of dinner went without much incident; Ken and I got into a friendly debate about Bajoran politics once Danek got into his bag to start some reading. Ken stole bites of my bacon as if to break even when I made a good point, considering what else to say as if it was something like a chess match.

Ken and Danek seemed different, somehow, outside of the house. More polite in some ways but ruder in others, as if there was something almost fake in how they interacted with people who weren't each other, and only in a way you'd have to be on the inside to notice. I was beginning to sense that among the whole house: that comfortable lack of care, the taking for granted of something between them I couldn't yet define. People who are simply roommates are never quite like that.


	5. Chapter 5

I knew the music by now. The shower trade-off, the speed and rhythm of Gaila or Ken or Toni trotting down the stairs, Toni slapping food ingredients onto the counter as she arranged lunch and tipping her head heavenward to yell upstairs instead of asking where anybody's seen someone. Danek fiddled with the piano in the late afternoons, apparently having gotten experimental and putting the instrument to some use after all, and there was one delicate melody he played at least once every day. (As far as I can tell it was his own composition—after the house, I never heard it again.)

On the weekend things were the same but louder. Ken and Gaila saw Danek had left out one of his PADDs and got into a wrestling match over who would leave a prank message in his schedule, the living room floor split with the bark of her high giggling as he tried to yank her across the carpet and tickle her into surrendering the stylus.

I was inching in, beginning to feel less like an oblique oddity and becoming part of the revolving routine without having to think so much about it. I ran into the occasional kinks, having to find ways to divert attention away from things I didn't think I could carry convincingly. There were times I may have seemed off but not to any extent that anyone would worry rather than just chuckle it off.

There were parts of it that were difficult in completely different ways. I had watched for every detail I could get and I'd gotten fairly well-versed in the harmonies, the permutations of their relationships, but there were parts of it I had misunderstood. Even those hours of observations couldn't have really prepared me for how close they all were.

It wasn't evident in little soft assuring ways but in the harder and deeper things, the things they didn't think twice about: Toni and Gaila putting on old rock music after dinner and having the impulse to sing along to the same favorite lines, Ken offering barely a description of an artist whose name he can't remember before Danek knows just the one he's thinking of, no one going without a few cozying rubs up and down their arms if they're noticeably shivering outside. I wouldn't have mistaken them for people who'd known each other a whole lot longer than they had, or thought they had; there was still room to grow together, but it only added an excited glow to every moment that they were still learning each other. I had forgotten how people could be in each other's pockets like that. The ache arrived stealthily, like a slow-motion grip of a fist around my heart. I might as well have been newly divorced and forced to go to somebody's wedding every single day.

I gave a report to Chris over a walk in the park out back early on Saturday—mostly about the residents' subdued treatment of the seriousness of the attack, trying to think of anything that might have been more evident in a look or a wordless action that he would have missed. "For the most part, they're glazing over it. I did make the comment about how I didn't want to talk about it, but since that was to the waiter...Hey, did you check in on that guy?"

"Yeah. It was pretty easy to get him checked out; he takes care of his mom right up the street. Apparently he hangs with the group sometimes, but it's more of a friend-of-a-friend thing. But Jim, the thing about the _chip_. Have you got any ideas about that?"

"Not really. It sounds like maybe Will gave him something to look after but made him promise he wouldn't actually snoop...I might comb his room if I get the chance, but when everything's routine, he's usually home when I am."

"I know you don't like doing that stuff, but if you get the chance, take it. We could be overreacting, it could be something totally meaningless. But you know, it could also be something like a...no-pun-intended—"

"A will. I thought of that. It would be kind of morbid to suggest he'd look at it while the guy's just in a coma, though..."

"Yeah, they're a strange bunch, though. Really strange."

 _Are they?_ I wanted to ask. "I'll see if I can poke at it, but it's gonna be a tough one."

"The main thing I want you to do now is dig for histories, okay? Bring up Danek's daddy, bring up Toni's hometown, just see if there are any tells and make sure you don't explicitly come off like you believe it, you know what I mean?"

"Sure."

"See if you can harp on it when they're around other people and compare it to how it is at home, and never take for granted what Will may or may not have known. Try to get everyone's life story; ignore the fact that you know they don't have them."

It was becoming pretty easy to ignore. From the distance of only knowing about them and in my knowledge of them as these unexplainable creatures lurking at some corner of the city, as they'd seemed to me before the operation started, there had been something almost grotesque about the idea of their lives. The flawlessly tangible presence of them, when coupled with the knowledge that there was something there that was carefully fabricated, should have put my mind so far into an uncanny valley, but it didn't. The fact of their creation, when I wasn't practically forgetting about it completely, was something that held a fire through them.

I observed the way Danek fingered through his notes, his mind racing to tie one idea to another like some animal bolting from a cage. I heard Ken in the next room watching old B-movies, chuckling to himself at hokey lines. I learned Toni's consistent quirks, of itching the arch of her foot on the heel of the other, biting her thumbnail when she wanted to hide something in her expression. They were less and less like haunted, impossible machines and more like something that I thought of as soulfully composed, someone's masterpiece sent well adrift. I thought that they were perfect.

 

 

It may not have been the best way to go about my current assignment, but I was trying to get one-on-one time with people now that I was confident enough in how I was doing to be able to feel out the finer edges. It was one thing to see how close Gaila and Ken or Ken and Danek were by watching them; trying to understand Will's intimate particulars by the way others were to him was something else entirely. Things seemed uncomplicated enough with everyone, but I knew it could be risky to take very much of that for granted.

Just after sundown on Sunday the other three were out on a grocery run and Toni was sitting at the kitchen table. I'd deduced just the day before that Toni was the one with the stop-motion hobby; while the birthday greeting was the only one of her little films that had been put on Will's camera, she had loads of her own recordings somewhere. That evening she was putting together some little cathedral-looking thing with intricately woven pieces of wicker, cursing when I entered the kitchen because the lights had just flickered out. This happened pretty often due to a malfunctioning detector on the solar energy system; usually the lights booted back on within a minute or two, but I took the opportunity to ask if Toni wanted to get some fresh air, figuring this could be read as offering her a cigarette; she was the only other person in the house who smoked and had been complaining about being unable to find her electronic cigarette earlier that day. She tapped her nails against the table in a brief second of restless thought, then accepted with a "Sure."

A breeze licked up at Toni's bangs as we sat side-by-side on the small stoop. I lit my cigarette, tucked it next to the pinky and offered her one. She hesitated for a second—she very reasonably despises paper cigs—but then took one, wrinkling her mouth and quoting in a mock-barritone, " _The thinker's true cigarette. Make it Slatroys_ ," and yeah, there are definitely a couple things I like about Toni. I had finally gotten to the point where I wasn't constantly comparing her to Uhura; that had come even more naturally than I'd expected it to. In the pictures on the IDs the similarities had been rigid, and even when watching the recordings I'd had to train myself out of certain expectations with her. But when I got close to the real thing, there was someone else under there as obviously as a different sound; I couldn't decipher her psychology, but just the surface of it moving behind her eyes had its own locomotion to it, and I managed after a time to start feeling like she didn't even look so much like Uhura. Danek almost didn't look like Spock.

"Sorry," she muttered with a laughing smile, because I'd looked a little sheepish about the dig.

"It's alright. I hope you find yours," I said, knocking my elbow lightly into her arm.

"I can't figure out what I did with it, it's driving me crazy," she said, scoffing in agitation. After taking a first drag and relaxing down a bit, she asked, "How was the meeting? Danek's totally obsessing over that paper."

"It was fine. Nichols loves him."

"Danek loves Nichols," she said back with a rising eyebrow and I could tell this was often a point of humor.

"Danek would dutifully have babies for Nichols if he asked him."

She laughed, high and pleasantly raspy at the end. "He's sort of exceptionally invested, though. Do you know what I mean?"

"I guess."

"Like he's been pouring everything into this because he's too stressed to think about...well, fucking everything else. Fuck."

Toni—and I say this sort of affectionately—would make a terrible undercover. It hadn't taken me long to notice she's prone to outbursts of all types. Get her drunk and there's no filter of any kind (which I suppose I could have been thinking that I could eventually use, except that if she had anything to hide in the first place the personality trait could have all been a show anyway). I always remember her in different bursts of emotion showing in half a second flat, her heart always faster than her head. I had a hard time believing she would be any good at keeping secrets.

I let the moment rest as Toni looked away, scraping the sole of her shoe against the ground for no reason in particular. Then I said, "He doesn't have anything to worry about."

She made a sound that might have been a grumble of Will's name. For the next moment, that topic seemed to have passed without properly coming up in the first place. The trees had their own conversations, stirring in the wind. When I stopped staring out into the park and glanced at Toni, she looked like she might have been shaking her head at herself. Then her voice came, small and tight and darkly matter-of-fact.

"You scared the shit out of us."

I moved my cigarette to my other hand so I could put my hand on her knee, only briefly. "Hey..."

"I mean, what the fuck were you doing in that part of town in the first place?"

"Toni," I said all taken-aback. "I don't _remember_. You know that, right?"

"Yeah, I know that, and it's driving me up the wall. It's like I want to punch you in the face or something but I can't exactly get pissed at you for something you don't remember or don't know why you did."

I gave a weak shrug, mumbled, "It's not like we completely avoid that part of town."

"Like you wouldn't flip your shit if one of us went to a place like that _alone_?"

"...You're right." I shook my head, looked lost. "I know you're right, but I don't know what to say. I don't remember."

I was letting her break me in; the frustrations of any kind of amnesia can really wear on somebody, and none of them had seen it yet, but I was putting it on just enough then for her to believe I wasn't completely fine by any means. Sure enough, she looked a bit guilty, but it only seemed to worsen her frustration.

"I'm sorry," I offered.

"Don't, forget it, I'm just being—"

"I know it isn't my fault, but—"

"Look, you don't know what it was like," she interrupted heavily, loudly. "It happened to us too. You're back and you're fine and everything's fine, but it feels wrong to me how we're all just pretending nothing's happened. Most of us didn't sleep for that whole week, you know. Even after you were awake? It was like...we just couldn't calm down. It was awful."

"But it's okay now. I'm okay."

"I know, but the night it happened, the way everything went...If you'd been there you'd understand. We were all so freaked out, I can't even explain it..."

I furrowed my brow, putting out the last of my cigarette. "What do you mean?"

She let out a long sigh, hesitating.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want."

"Of course I want to tell you, it's just..." She had her forehead rested in on her hands for a couple seconds, and took quite a while to speak again. "That night. Well, Ken and Gaila had gone upstairs already, and I was with Danek in the kitchen. He was feeling talkative...he was in a pretty good mood actually, and he just sat there with me and we must have been talking for one, maybe two hours, while I was working on a few of my pieces. Gaila came in from work and went straight up to bed, and only about twenty minutes after that...God, the weirdest thing happened. I was right in the middle of a sentence and I suddenly realized that you hadn't come home yet, and I stopped. And the crazy thing is, I didn't check the clock or anything like that, but Danek...he looked right at me and then we both looked up at the door, and I could just _tell_ that we were both thinking it, that you would usually be home by then.

"And then...Jesus. The next minute I heard Ken and Gaila coming downstairs, and they came into the kitchen and we took one look at them and they were looking at us...and we all just knew. Ken was the first to actually say it. 'Something's happened to Will.'"

She looked at me and I hardly had to do much to react appropriately. Something in me had gone a little cold.

"So we started calling you and you weren't answering, and there could've been a hundred reasons you were late or that you weren't picking up, but we were all just _panicked_. And when we found out..." Toni's voice buckled out.

I was picturing the fact that it would have been Chris who came knocking at the door with the bad news, how it seemed now that the frantic mess he might have been met with was so far from what I could have possibly pictured, and I somehow couldn't stop the thought from entering my head: _Why wasn't I told about this?_ He had met all of them that night in that way, barged in on them and surely seen the extent of the upset, but he hadn't mentioned it to me in nearly enough detail. But I didn't have to wonder why he hadn't; it simply hadn't been relevant. I'd had no reason to know.

It was too dark for me to tell whether Toni was doing anything like crying, but I could feel that she was hitting her hard deck. Out of everyone in the house she's surprisingly the most prone to being vaguely embarrassed by physical affection, the one exception being Gaila's ever-present little squeezes, but she seemed okay with it when I lightly rubbed up and down her back. "Hey," I mumbled into her shoulder. "It's okay."

"I know it's stupid to think of it this way, but I just can't stand it," she said, her voice wavering a bit, "the fact that somebody could want to hurt someone like you...It makes me so angry I don't even know what to do."

"Toni...You shouldn't talk like—"

"It probably wasn't personal, I know. Still."

My arm came back down to my own lap. "Well, you never know, it could have been a rage of envy. I'm a dashing fellow. Just ask Jek. We all know he'd love to—"

"You're so not funny. It's not _funny_ ," she interrupted by shoving hard into my shoulder and I started to snigger a little until she was joining in. "Fuck, stop. I don't want to hear about all the dirty sonnets you guys kept swapping at that party."

"I never," I protested lazily.

"William Abraham Kenley, you do not get to have amnesia about that."

The lights kicked back on in the kitchen and I jumped from not being used to it, but for some reason it just made her give in to laughing even more. When we heard the others coming home I helped her up off the stoop and Danek appeared holding a bag of vegetables and wearing a softening look at the sight of Toni clinging to me only briefly to avoid the second step that needed to be fixed, wobbling through the doorway and still laughing at something we'd already forgotten.

 

 

Over a week had passed. I still hadn't found the hole to dig in that Chris had wanted me to look for, but he hadn't expected it to be an easy task. I would have at least felt more accomplished if, after finally getting an early afternoon when Danek was away long enough for me to comb through his very sparse and uncomplicated belongings, I'd actually found anything even resembling the chip he'd referred to earlier. There weren't even data chips he used for everyday storage to throw me off; he didn't seem to like using them.

I was supposed to be watching Gaila somewhat more closely than the others, especially when I did manage to get any biographical discussion going. And I did watch her: I watched the way she got a member of the cafeteria staff intentionally flustered by cooling her neck off with an ice cube, watched her do a little dance around Toni cooing about how pretty she looked before she left for her date on Tuesday night, noted that she apparently disliked Kara West from all the looks she gave about the table when Ken wasn't looking during the couple times we had her over for dinner. Without any rational (or professional) way to place it, I was beginning to find it increasingly laughable that she was our biggest suspect. When it came to someone who might be capable of purchasing a batch of skinjobs, I had no idea what type of person we should have been looking for, but my observation of her felt more and more like excessive homework as the days went by.

So far there was one thing about her that was unusual: She had been having nightmares. With little else to tell me about the last time I'd checked in with him, Chris had mentioned this somewhat offhandedly, not knowing what to make of it yet. It must have taken a couple incidents of whispering in the middle of the night for anyone to pick up on it being a frequent thing, that Gaila would come down from her top bunk and ask if she could climb into bed with Ken. As far as Chris and I could tell she was keeping it to one person that she kept having these dreams; if it was anything unusual for her, she was being moderately secretive about it.

Aside from that bit there was nothing interesting: I could assume if there were any alarm bells of reminiscing conversations going on in the bedroom _a trois_ that I would have already been told; as it was, Chris said that most of what went on upstairs was innocent gossip, hairstyling and snoring.

You would think that the conditions of their memories would be pretty apparent from the get-go, but at the start Chris and I had both been pretty unsure about whether this group might simply be pushing something very consciously to the edges. After all, if any of them didn't believe it to be a lie that they came from the cities and backgrounds their fake IDs had packaged them with, there would have to be a reason none of them mentioned a single thing about where they had been before New Dublin. They only ever vaguely did, but what took me completely by surprise was that when the topic did come peeking out, I wasn't the first to bring it up.

We were eating dinner in a casual sprawl around the coffee table and the couch. Toni was swapping her PADD around with Ken and Danek as they were half-heartedly competing at some logic game in-between some attempts to help Toni study her French.

At some point I was urging Ken to reiterate a story he'd told me earlier about how he saw the college mascot, in full big-headed costume, trip and faceplant onto a group of prospective students who were having a picnic on the quad. It was easily Toni who found this the funniest, and while she was too beside herself to concentrate on grammar, Gaila leaned and shook her head back so that her hair was tossed around my knee. I would've been in trouble if I hadn't picked up on this habit earlier: She loves it when people play with her hair, and sitting behind her when she's on the floor practically means you're volunteering.

I was sifting her hair around into something akin to a braid when I heard her say, "How awesome would it have been if that had happened to us our first day on campus?"

Danek looked up, one side of his mouth curling up. "I suppose if Will had volunteered to be the mascot that day instead of helping with that presentation, we would have been fated to meet in _some_ fashion..." Toni giggled.

 _Get in there_. "You know what's strange," I said, clearing my throat. The topic of the _incident_ had come up a couple more times since my heart-to-heart with Toni, so I was fairly confident it wasn't still a mood-wrecker: "Out of all that stuff the cops were asking me about, one thing they actually asked about _multiple_ times was how we all met."

"Oh yeah, us too," Gaila excitedly pulled back to look at me. "It was so weird...Why did they need to know?"

"I honestly don't wish to ponder it," Danek muttered, but it didn't feel entirely dismissive of the topic.

"The thing was, I had a hard time remembering a couple details, so," jokingly, "I hope my story wasn't...inconsistent. But it probably doesn't matter."

"What couldn't you remember?" Danek asked.

"Like..." I shrugged. "I wasn't sure which one of you I talked to first..."

"It was Ken—" Toni and Gaila were laughing at their own simultaneity, but then just Gaila said, "Remember, the guy called you up to the front by your last name, and he thought he heard 'Ken,' not 'Kenley'..."

Ken scoffed. "Right, and I go up to the desk and the professor's just kind of politely ignoring me, and you must have had no idea why I was standing up there but just struck up a conversation just for the hell of it while he got his stuff together..."

"Okay, yeah," I said with a distant grin. "Yeah, I kinda remember that."

"And then, I don't know, we had some really mundane chat but then you asked should we sit together at the ice cream thing, and everything else happened."

"I still remember the first time I saw Toni," Gaila said, and Toni threw the hair band she'd been messing with at her. "Carrying that huge bag because she got locked out of her dorm room when she'd left that thing in the lobby and didn't have time to do anything about it."

"It's not like I could have fucking left it there to get stolen, I had all the clothes I owned in that bag," Toni groaned. "Granted, I had like three outfits at the time, but I still looked ridiculous..."

Ken interjected, "She lugs that thing into the lunch room and Will and I are just looking at this poor girl and giving these looks to each other; I finally go, 'What did you bring me?'"

"Which annoyed the crap out of me. I was so embarrassed. And then Kara's with this big group at the other table and kind of takes pity on me and tries to wave me over...To this day, I don't really know why I didn't sit over there instead of with you guys, but I just..." She trailed off, shrugging, with an amused mock-rueful smile on her face. "Maybe I thought Gaila looked nice, I don't know."

"Danek only sat with us because there was nowhere else to sit when he came in," Gaila remembered. "I guess we're lucky it was one of the few times in your life you haven't been early."

"We're lucky he talked to us at all," Ken remarked.

"Well, he didn't really," Toni said. "Remember, he was sitting down when the announcer started talking, but...no, wait, didn't Will write him a note or something?"

My heart startled in my chest at the sudden memory: unsigned notes Spock and I were leaving on each other's computers for the couple weeks that our desks weren't yet pushed together. I told myself to knock it off.

Gaila was pointing at me: "Oh, that's right! That's why I assumed you guys already knew each other at first. You jotted something onto your PADD and then slid it over and I was like, '...Oh.'" She laughed, imitating some blinking dubious expression. "Those two, I guess, I don't know, he looks kind of like, uptight..."

"You didn't think Will seemed a little, uh, stuffy?" Toni said, putting a grin my way to make it harmless.

I was squinting like something was at the edge of my memory that I couldn't quite reach. "So what did the note say?"

Danek's face fell into a tiny shock, almost imperceptibly, and I thought, _Oh, fuck, fuck fuck fuck..._

Then Ken said, "Wait, you don't remember? I've asked you guys plenty of times, you won't tell me."

It was a joke, that they refused to tell anybody just to be teasing about it; I came out of my floundering and launched for that possibility, playing off like it had just been coyness. I shrugged and said, "I really have no idea at all," then a couple seconds later, gave Danek an oblique smirk.

I was innerly collapsing into relief when Danek's glance narrowed but then lightened into an easier expression. In a short moment I could tell he'd probably forgotten all about it.

"You know what I just thought of, when you said that about only owning a few pairs of clothes?" Ken was turning slightly into Toni's direction as he idly rattled the ice in his glass. "How it was so weird that none of us had like any stuff when we moved in."

Gaila pouted vaguely. "People get rid of stuff before they move, though."

"I mean, it's not that it's weird on any individual basis," Ken said. "It was just that we were all like that. A lot of students have a whole lot of stuff, and even more stuff at home, but with us..."

"I think it makes an amount of sense," Danek interrupted calmly. "Considering our situations."

The way he said that word, _situations_ , it rang with a meaning that seemed to carry a warning: _We don't talk about that_. I was starting to feel like I could hardly keep up with all the strangeness in this conversation.

There was a brief slide of thick silence in the room. When Toni said something again, she was looking down at her PADD screen at the same time and the way she spoke seemed deliberately daring. "Sometimes I wonder what may have happened to all my old clothes. Like if anybody's holding onto them."

Something lit in Ken's features, his eyes showing something vulnerable I'd never seen in them before. "Me too."

"I had to give them away," Gaila said with a shrug, her voice the most hesitant but not unwilling, "but you all probably would have figured that."

"I just wonder about the clothes I had when I was little, because I think I'd been still hoarding some of them," Toni said. "I remember this dress with a cat on it—"

"Listen, about the questioning," Danek interjected, seeming to wield up my attention. "Will, have you heard anything—"

"—Wait, that's kind of funny." Ken didn't even seem to realize he had interrupted; they were absorbed. "Because I had this one embarrassing pair of mittens with cats on them—But I didn't even think they were embarrassing, I must have really loved them, because I got made fun of for wearing them a lot..."

I was blinking over at Danek; the look on his face that was only for me was strange. It was entirely clear that it was quietly imploring, like he was expecting me to say or do something, but I couldn't begin to catch up to what it was, except that he had most definitely been attempting to change the subject.

"Oh yeah, I wore the dorkiest shit," Toni waved her hand out in amusement, "like especially around holidays I'd be going all out..."

Gaila, giggling leisurely, said, "No one where I lived would have—"

"No pasts," Danek said.

A couple tick-ticks of a tree branch hitting one of the windows in the wind was the only utterance; everything was quiet.

The phrase hadn't been spoken loudly, but with an immediate weight, holding the magnetism of a maxim. Everyone's eyes went to their laps, back to reading almost as if no one had been talking at all, back to the screen on the wall even though the movie we'd been watching several minutes ago had been muted.

For a long stiff number of minutes, no one spoke again. Through the long stretch of time in which I imitated the rest, I was left to contemplate what in the hell had just happened.

I had no idea what to do with the stories of them first meeting. My antsy instinct halfway through the conversation was to get Chris to chase down Kara West and see if she was actually _sure_ she had been there when the group met. But then, Toni had mentioned her. I didn't see how there could be such effective deception on both sides, which left me with the fact that this whole story was probably true.

I believed wholeheartedly that Chapel had been right: You couldn't program them to meet and like each other, not in such an immediate way. The one theory I'd been clinging to was that this was a big elaborate ruse, one that they were happy to play with themselves as some unhealthy coping mechanism and which also needed to be preserved if only for the sake of Gaila, the one unplanned friendship in the mix, the true humanoid who slotted right in. Then, maybe Will and Danek had known each other already when Will had passed that note. The message had been some last exchange of plans before the production slipped into something so permanent that it was almost believed by all of them.

This idea felt completely absurd, but it had been what I had, until I'd made that slip of not remembering what I'd written to Danek. His reaction had been too slight to be faked. I couldn't read anything other than the ache of genuine nostalgia in that fact: When he'd thought for a second that Will had forgotten the moment they met, he hadn't been confused, or suspicious, as if I'd made some misstep in the dialogue. He had only been hurt.


	6. Chapter 6

The atmosphere was still wobbly between everyone much later that night, though only evident in petty little hiccups, like Toni grumbling Ken's name after she tripped over his ice skates in the foyer even though she had no reason to be irritated with him. The whole house was turned down to a mild sulk and I didn't feel the need to casually announce I was getting a smoke before I made a quick exit out back.

Leaning a shoulder into one of the first trees at the edge of the park, I asked as soon as Chris picked up, "Do we have Christine Chapel on call?"

Chris patched me through on the transmission; Chapel picked up promptly and went from sounding tired to somewhat eager when Chris greeted her.

"Hey, it's Jim Kirk," I said.

"Hi, Jim. What can I do for you?"

"Something came up today that made me think of a couple of Korby's artificial memory theories. I'm assuming you're familiar with them?"

I thought I heard a muffled clearing of Chapel's throat. "Of course, sure."

"I wanted to run this by you first before I go trying to convince Chris about it. Would you say, if one or more individuals in the house is aware of them having false memories, that they would have a reason to instill some taboo about talking about, maybe even thinking about certain memories? I know that he had two theories about it, but I haven't read up on it in several years."

"For the record," Chris muttered, "I don't know anything about this shit."

Chapel made an amused hum. "Well, the thing is, his second theory has been suggested to be way more likely in recent studies. The _first_ theory, if that's what you're asking me about, is that too much preoccupation with the details of the memories can make them corruptible. Like, if one of them was to realize there's some tiny flaw, any kind of inconsistency that doesn't stack up, the entire information would basically start crashing and the memories would die."

Chris prompted, "But the second thing is...?"

"The second theory states that the memories really aren't corruptible in that sense, because memory systems have been improved much more effectively than personality programming." I heard a chinking noise, like she was drinking from an ice-filled glass. "But under that theory, it's all about the idea of, you know, the experience of what it's like to remember something. It's easy to make a very young A.I. individual believe its own memories, because in essence, they don't understand what long-term memory is really like. But as they get older and collect more and more memories, it may take a while, but sooner or later they would supposedly start to realize that maybe something that they think happened eight years ago is something they don't 'remember' the same way they remember two years ago. It's less about how _well_ they remember or the clarity of it. Korby knew it wasn't something we could prove, since you can't exactly sit down with a cyborg and compare notes on the exact levels of emotions or thoughts attached to one memory over another, or the human versus non-human perspective. It's far too subjective...but you have to admit the theory makes a lot of sense, right?"

"So," Chris put in, "Jim, this 'no pasts' thing. Has anything else come up that could give you an idea where that came from?"

"No. But it's easy to believe they go by it all the time. And judging from the conversation, it seems like the rule is that nothing before they all met is fair game."

I heard Chris thoughtfully clicking something against a desk. "Miss Chapel, I think that's all we need you for."

"Yeah, thanks," I said.

"Okay." She sounded a bit distracted, but thought to say, "Hey, Jim. Good luck," before she clicked off.

"Jim," Chris said, his tone a bit heavier now. "You know what I'm worried about now."

I let out a long sigh.

"It would be different if Gaila hadn't been playing along, but since she did, you have to consider it a very real possibility that she's onto you. And I mean onto _you_."

Again with Gaila being top suspect, it was an irritating thing to keep in mind: if she was fully aware that she was surrounded by clones, and especially if she had any reason to know that Will's source is in fact a cop...

"Right," I said. "I really don't think so, but..."

"Jim, you can _disagree_ all you want. Just don't let it affect how careful you are."

"Of course not, sir."

"Good. The point is, you were unsure about who might have initiated the little code, even when Danek was the one who interrupted; the fact that she wasn't the one who put a stop to the conversation doesn't necessarily tell us anything. I need you to try to dig up how _she_ feels about the rules, and if you can, how anybody else does too."

"Got it."

"Now how are you holding up? Sleeping okay?"

With the amount of edginess attached to the job, lack of sleep is one of the typical concerns about undercovers, who need to be so constantly in check that it isn't one of the issues anyone's boss is eager to wave off with some advice about caffeine. I was just fine though, and told him so. Our call ended seconds after that. 

When I got back inside, the place was a little less quiet. Ken and Toni had moved into the kitchen to study more and were talking at a calm murmer. I told both of them goodnight and retired to my room a little early. As if I'd jinxed my claims to Chris about sleeping well, my head was swimming with more thoughts than usual, and it took me over an hour to finally fall asleep.

 

 

The next day was my heaviest afternoon of classes, followed by an evening when I had a huge paper everyone knew about and had to retreat into busywork for a couple hours overlapping dinner. It wasn't until nighttime that I really had an excuse to be talkative, and it wasn't helped by what I couldn't help perceiving as a slight tightness in the air between everyone, even though it was just subtle enough that it might have been in my head. I had noted the night before that it was possible I wasn't being quite warm enough to Danek, so I sat right next to him after coming in from a cigarette break, sighing into the couch. I vaguely muttered, "Tired."

"Hmm." Next to my foot, Danek's left one shifted up a little, a pull of attention even as he didn't look over at me. "Did you ask for an extension on any of your work?"

"Huh," I huffed as if too tired to laugh. "What do you think?"

"I think possibly you're overly devoted to economic subjects you could teach better than the professor does."

"I wouldn't say so when you don't know the professor."

"I would say so," he said without looking up or over. "I just did say so."

I broke out into a grin and as if he felt it, I saw the tip of his mouth pull up just slightly next to me as he highlighted a passage on his PADD.

I felt like there was no acknowledgment of the disconnection between us from yesterday. He did give me a look a couple times, as if he was wondering if there was something I wanted to talk to him about. Unless we had some consequential time alone, there was nothing with him I wanted to push just yet, so I only took the opportunity to let us relax in each other's company for an hour or so before he got up to take his evening shower.

I was putting away dishes in the kitchen some time after that when I spotted Gaila out in the yard. She was talking on her personal comm and sitting on the little garden bench out in the middle of the grass just beyond where the small amount of light from the kitchen was able to easily reach.

I went outside, stepping gently so as to possibly not be heard, but not exactly sneaking. I deduced from the couple words I picked up that she was just swapping shifts with a coworker, and just when I was a yard or so behind her she quickly ended the conversation and hung up. From the way she stretched her arms back behind her and idly yawned without looking back at all I figured she didn't realize I was there. In a second her head tilted with curiosity and she stood up to take a couple steps forward, fingering at the petals blooming on the little scrap of flowers the yard had next to the old bird bath. I smirked when I came up behind her, pivoted forward slowly and then lurched to grab her shoulders.

She didn't scream, but the gasp was an ugly one: Gaila nearly fell down and her breath picked up in a snap, loud and frantic.

"—Hey hey, it's me."

" _Will_ ," she groaned in agitation, leaning over in a collapse to rest her hands on her legs.

"I'm sorry..."

" _Shit_." Gaila pressed her hand over her chest. She sounded like she hardly had air to speak, and when I reached to grab her by the shoulders, she was actually trembling. 

"I'm so sorry. Dammit, I'm a total ass. Here, sit down..."

She was trying to shirk it off by now, smiling a little manically as she let me lead her over to sitting back down.

"My God. You're like those puppies they were selling at the park that wouldn't stop sort of _vibrating_..."

She laughed weakly, wiping something out of her own features. "Wait, what?"

"You know, that old guy who was trying to sell the dogs. And they were all _excitable_ , and Ken—"

"Oh yeah. 'Do they ever stop?'" Her shoulders twitched in something close to laughing.

"Yeah." A silence fell around for a moment as Gaila consciously calmed her breathing. I said, "Sorry again."

"It's okay." In a fluid extension of a reassuring gesture I gave to her shoulder, she inched in and half-leaned against me, letting her ear rest to my shoulder.

"Do you know if Danek's angry about yesterday?" she asked after a moment.

"...No. I don't think so."

The ambient rustling of the woods was the only sound for another moment. More quietly, she added, "You're not mad, are you?"

I mentally fished for something vague. "You don't really think I'd be angry about it."

"Well, not _angry_ exactly. The funny thing is I don't really know anymore. You almost seemed like..." A shift against me as she shrugged. "Like you'd changed your mind about the whole thing. Because you were just kind of quiet."

"I don't know. I guess I didn't want to bother with any of it just then, so I didn't exactly take a side."

A little sniffing laugh—She sat up a bit, slapped a hand on my lap to idly rest it there. "You've always been on Danek's side, though. If this whole pact or whatever was even his idea in the first place. I actually kind of thought it was yours. But, you know, we usually talk like it was just something we all wanted. And it was, but..."

I muttered, "You don't want it anymore?"

I felt the barest, slightest flinch. Gaila felt like we were edging into taboo, reacting as if it extended damage to some greater, more important idea. This whole thing was _occult_. And yet, she didn't resist commenting. "I just wonder sometimes...if it's sort of my fault that we decided not to talk about that stuff."

I didn't get it, but I didn't think she expected me to, so I only waited for her to go on.

"We all realized pretty quickly that none of us have had these happy lives that we want to talk about with each other, but there has to be _something_ that's happy, or interesting, that some of you guys could share about yourselves. I just think sometimes that it's because I've got nobody. Danek's got the shittiest of emotionally unavailable fathers that ever lived, and I don't even want to _know_ what Toni's parents did to her, the way she's hinted about it. But if you guys were to ever have anything to say about any of it, you might think, well, I shouldn't complain to the girl who doesn't even know what it's like to have a family."

"It's not like that." I was surprised by how quickly the words came, as if I had reason to firmly believe what I was saying. "It really is for everyone's sake."

For the next moment, Gaila looked out into the dark trees and I thought she looked grimly distracted by some other thought. I nudged her a bit with my shoulder, and finally she meekly said, "I feel like it's the same way with us, when we don't really think about what we're going to do."

"...What do you mean?"

"We all have this idea, like we're going to be living together forever, but it's impossible to just assume none of us will ever want other things. Any of you could....let's be real, you could _meet_ someone. Ken talks all the time about how he'd love to go live on Terra, and he doesn't mean it like he's planning to, but sometimes when he gets really into talking about it...it's hard to hear. We even went through that time when you didn't want to hear anything about leaving Niori...but, the point is that I wouldn't want to stop anyone from doing what they want, and I'm worried that the reason we're all so close is just because..." She shrugged. "Like you all just feel sorry for me for not having anybody else. And you all talk like with all the chances you have of ever going back to where you've been, those people might as well not even exist for you. But still, it doesn't seem like it could be the same. I need all of you a lot more than you need me."

"Bullshit." It wasn't like Will to be all that vulgar, but I doubted it stuck out right then. "You know that isn't true."

She let out a long, shaky breath.

"Gaila," I said, more softly, and she slouched down farther. Her hand reached down to mine and clutched it loosely so that our hands rested clasped on my leg, comfy as fingers reaching into a pocket. 

"We shouldn't talk about this," she whispered.

"I want you to talk about anything you want to," I said easily, after a second.

I thought for a moment the conversation had gotten away; she seemed flighty and sleepy. But then she articulated this one other thing: "It's okay if we never share more with each other. Most of the time I don't think it matters at all."

"Why?" I muttered, uncertain of how I could push this far enough.

"Even though I'm curious...I wonder if it's the same for all of you as it is for me." She took a second to put the right thing into words. "It feels to me like everything that's been happening in my life since I met all of you has been so much more significant than anything else. Like it's brighter in my mind somehow. I've always been kind of afraid to ask if it's the same for the rest, this feeling that there's this thing about us that's different...But I hate not knowing whether we're all just kind of bizarre together or if it's just me."

"...What do you mean by different?"

She scoffed weakly at herself. "I don't know. Don't you ever think so? We're always saying how _lucky_ it was that we met each other, that we were friends so fast because we realized we connected over all this ugly stuff...But sometimes I have this feeling that it's deeper than that. I know this is the kind of thing that probably sounds ridiculous to you, but don't you ever get the idea that everyone else thinks that there's something really off about us? Not in a bad way, just...off." 

I allowed a pensive sigh. "I...Maybe. I don't know."

"Do you remember when we were at that party, and we were talking to Kara and Jek, and they were both kind of weirded out by the fact that none of us could remember whether we'd ever broken any bones? It started with Ken making that comment that he may have at some point but it was hard to remember whether he did when he was a kid. And then I said I definitely didn't know, and Danek agreed, and we almost had this laugh about it...But then Jek and Kara were looking at us all funny. Jek kind of said it wouldn't have been _too_ weird if one of us couldn't remember, but when it was all of us..." 

"They like us just fine, though. They could have just been messing around."

"I'm not saying they think there's something wrong with us, exactly, but what I remember the most about it is that, it wasn't that they thought it was strange that we all had that in common." Gaila spoke carefully. "The way Kara looked, I think it was more that _we_ couldn't see _why_ it was strange. That was what put her off so much. I think there are things about us she just can't put down. I get the impression sometimes that she's...studying us. I'm not just saying this because she annoys me sometimes. Most of the time I forget about it, but then she'll look at one of us a certain way..."

I suddenly realized, from what I remembered of Kara, that I had some idea of why she bothered Gaila so much. "I have to admit, there were a couple things she said the other night that seemed to carry this nasty implication. Like when she makes those comments about how we don't all have that much in common?"

A squeeze and agreeing shake of my hand and Gaila said, " _Yeah_. It's almost like she's saying she doesn't get why we're so close. Not just that, but that she's weirded out by it. What the hell is her problem?"

In my cynicism I didn't think the explanation for Kara West was all that complicated. Considering how polarizing a group can be simply for being likable but also noticeably much more into each other than other people, I had actually been surprised the few of them didn't have their share of casual enemies. To a certain shallow mindset they were too enviable to be regarded with ambivalence, but there was also the possibility that people like Kara were solely interested in collecting them into a menagerie of acquaintances who had good looks and smarts. It wasn't much of an unusual crime of Kara's if she just didn't like unpredictable.

"I guess I can't say I've never wondered. About us being different, I mean," I finally said. "...But it doesn't give me a bad feeling."

She considered for a few seconds, and decidedly affirmed, "Yeah. It doesn't really bother me either."

Another bit of silence, a mellower tone moving into the yard as we sat much more relaxed than we'd been earlier.

After a moment, candidly, Gaila said Will's name. "Hmm?" I mumbled. 

There are things in this world you don't take with a grain of salt. I should have been thinking through this entire conversation with Pike's hunch held in one hand and mine in the other, and on some level I did, but it felt at the most like some mathematical equation I had no real reason to remember. It was nothing for the way Gaila felt that night against my arm and my shoulder, something opulent and young emanating from the feel of her bones and my hand in hers as careful as you might clutch the fingers of a child. Gaila moved fearlessly and cheerfully through her life, but I had noticed the moments before, when she showed a staggering vulnerability to her. 

Her voice dropped to a whisper again: "Do you love me?"

For the first time since I'd entered the house, even more tensely than how I'd felt when the note had been brought up and I'd fluked, I felt myself freezing up. My mouth or my mind, something wasn't working. I took the breath in but it took me almost too long. 

"Yes," I said. "Very much."

She pressed a kiss to my shoulder and I rested my cheek on her head just a bit when her head propped back down. After that we were quiet for good, except for an impulsive humming that came later, Gaila mulling out a melody I recognized gradually as the one Danek played on the piano. My mind wandered far and in many directions, but not as restlessly as it had the night before.

The theory, of course, could be that Gaila was in fact a criminal, that she had me pegged and that this entire conversation had been her attempt to throw me off the trail. Her comment about Danek or Will seeming to be the initiators of the "pact"—it could have been some means of misdirection to make it doubtful that she had been the first to ever suggest it. Aside from that, there were still little things that had me confused about what was known by everyone else in the house, and for all that had been discussed, the investigation could have been all the way back to square one. Day by day I examined all four of them in this dizzying rotation, all of them snug and secret as chambers in a revolver and I had no way of knowing if they were loaded.

It seemed like the most resounding part of what I'd learned that day was what made me able to now put more of a face to the kind of person who'd been in control of what they knew and what they felt; the vision was as vague as ever, but it had a grim and cruel twist to it. 

Illogically, I connected my idea of it to the convenient details of Will Kenley's biography I'd invented that long day sitting down with Chris, even as I'd been oblivious to the eventual repercussions. In a way entirely separate from being connected genetically, it was because of a story I'd made up that Will probably believed he had a sister somewhere or that he had merely average aptitude scores from his teenage years for some incongruous reason. I felt a sense of responsibility for who he had been that you'd have to be in my shoes to really understand. I could comprehend in a sense what it would be to invent the pasts for several different people along the schematics of limited events, what it would mean to tailor their psychology for a specific use, because I had done this with the version of Will that I'd been able to control. 

I could understand the cold hard function of packaging them with the kind of memories they would never be inclined to revisit whenever it was avoidable. I understood why this anonymous creator had done it, and I blindly hated him for it. It made me suspect with a heady feeling in my gut that whatever their minds or bodies had been harvested for, they were never even loved as someone's misdirected use of genius and passion, but seen only as instruments. 

And this fact brought me back, sharply, to the increasingly maddening question that felt like the entire reason I was here: What the hell were they all doing in the house?

 

 

"Still staying home, Danek?" I asked, entering the kitchen to fill up a water bottle with a small bag slung over my shoulder. "It's not too late to change your mind."

He looked over from where he'd been looking out into the yard, his morning mile-high glass of grapefruit juice in hand. "I'm even less up to it than before, unfortunately."

The rest of us were preparing for a day away at the park areas in the middle of the city—"the Villages" was the common label this group used for it—and Danek was apparently the only one who occasionally neglected to join in on these trips they all made once or twice a month. He had complained about his work load the night before, but I could tell now that he simply looked exhausted. "Oh. Are you feeling alright?"

Toni came in, immediately asking me, "Did you convince him?" I ruefully shook my head.

"Let him stay," Gaila said playfully from the next room. "We don't need his backseat driving."

Danek protested that, frowning. "I can restrain myself. Except for when Ken is the one driving."

"I'm a good driver, you ass!" came Ken from the living room.

"You may be an exemplary one, my friend, but it would be at driving something other than a car—"

Laughing, Toni solidly interrupted, "So, Danek's not going. Surprise, surprise. I want to be ready in five minutes, everyone."

"Yeah, right," Ken grumbled. "Gaila couldn't be ready to go anywhere in under twenty minutes to save her—"

"You know what, _sir_ ," Gaila cut in with a wrestling squeeze at Ken's ticklish point. 

We were finally in the car something like twenty-five minutes later. Gaila drove during the ride over; it was me in the passenger seat and Toni and Ken being the most talkative in the back, while Gaila or me occasionally turned down the volume of the music to get a couple words into the livelier parts of their conversation. 

The drive to the center was forty or fifty minutes. I'd made the trip plenty of times, sometimes even for leisure, but in recent months I'd avoided the whole location. There was nothing I could do about the ugly reminders the areas might bring up for me now, but as the interstates narrowed to bumpier roads with greener backgrounds, it was easier than I'd expected to adopt the mood of the others.

At the entrance to one of the huge forest parks, we had to stop into one of the strip mall structures to buy day passes. The park was usually visited by people intending to camp there for the night, but as far as I could tell the group usually just partied late into the evening and then went home once they were sobered up.

Gaila complained that she'd forgotten to bring a good sweater, so we swung by one of the rustic little shops so that she could look for one. A couple minutes before we'd arrived there I'd gotten a message. It was when we split up for a few minutes at the stores that I got the chance to look at it.

_Mic malfunc. Re: Pike ASAP._

I grumbled a low disbelieving curse, then backed around the building quite a bit so that I could be sure they wouldn't hear me on the comm from anywhere close to the car.

As soon as I heard Chris answer I said, "You gotta be fucking kidding me."

He sounded just as agitated as I did. "If I had anybody to replace the guy with, I would've fired my surveillance rookie, but there's shit-all for it right now."

"It's his fault?"

"Long story, but, I called up Scott and the way he explained the reason for the malfunction, it has something to do with the voice monitoring settings. You're supposed to write down this one frequency...fuckery-fuck thing when you first hook it up, and he didn't do it, and we're basically getting this jumbled distorted bullshit that's impossible to understand. You need to get your extra, but I know you can't do that until later."

"I most definitely cannot," I confirmed tersely. "I'll take care of it as soon as I can...Thankfully, I kinda doubt the conversation was going to get that heavy today anyway."

"Yeah." He sighed. "I know it's kind of the opposite of what you're used to doing, but try to keep it that way. You need to actually skirt around the heart-to-hearts."

"I think I can manage it."

"Okay. Uh, we should pick up the signal as soon as you activate the other mic, but shoot me a message when you've got it hooked up just in case?"

"Right. Look, I doubt I'll get that hung up, but don't worry if it's not until the wee hours? It's possible we won't head straight back to the house even when we're done with the trip."

"Alright."

"Oh, and Chris? Go easy on your guy. You can be a scary bastard sometimes."

I heard a laugh before Chris ended the call.

A few minutes later I was in the bathroom of the little sandwich shop across the street. I stretched down the collar of my t-shirt, reached in and ripped off the mic and then crammed it into an inner pocket of my bag.

 

 

Gaila was cocking an eyebrow at something on a poster and lazily tucking her ID into the breast pocket of the button-up plaid shirt she had on. She looked over with a distracted grin when I nudged her to get going with a little kick at her toes.

"Mr. William," she said with a silly wistfulness. I smiled and let her put her arm through mine as we walked off to the car. Immediately I noticed the lightness, that my instinct to worry about her brushing up and noticing the tape at the slightest hint of contact was an unneeded one. 

We stopped the car later at a place that rented out quad bikes, going through some amusingly complicated stealth to avoid the owner suspecting we were planning on doubling up on the vehicles. This involved me and Gaila whistling our way well into the beginnings of the fat hiking path until the sound of engines growled up and Ken and Toni were cranking to a stop just behind us. Gaila hopped up behind Toni and I made some joke about Danek's confidence in Ken's driving as I edged onto the back of his seat. We were off.

I think it's impossible to explain that whole day. I've never known anyone who wore the wind like these people did, their occasional giddy yells streaking colors through the breeze, the air swirling up into black and red and brown hair like the billowing motion of something underwater. Toni had a flask tucked in her belt that she took out and passed around whenever we stopped for a break. The booze hit thickly and time got diluted. Dusk had seemed to suddenly swipe its way in when we stopped at a slight clearing, setting up a blanket and huddling in a circle over the snickerdoodles somebody had brought.

Toni was decidedly the most drunk, or at least the most enthusiastically so. She and Gaila were recounting some story I was pretty sure no one needed to be told for the first time, and she had a kind of beautifully ugly laugh that wouldn't quit, husky but contagious. Next to her Gaila was the most affected by it, her forehead bouncing against Toni's shoulder. It felt like it had been a lifetime since I'd been around this kind of mirth, the way people will just be laughing at laughing after a certain point; when I actually considered it for a second, I had a brief flashback to one of the Murder squad's bar meets that had ended disastrously, or fantastically, depending on who you ask. During my first few months on the unit I could have easily gotten in trouble if it had gotten around that I once got carried away to the point of slamming my beer down and yelling, "We _are_ the police!" when a bartender threatened to comm the law just because we got a bit loud.

"It's nice that they don't let more than a few people come out here," I commented when we'd quieted down a bit. "We passed that one group all day and that was it."

"I don't know that it's because of how many they let in," Ken said. "Business at the center isn't doing well lately, especially in this park. At least it's not a good place to do family stuff, cause kids get really creeped out."

"Creeped out, why?" Toni asked. "Because of that couple who got murdered?"

"Well, that doesn't _help_ , considering that it was in the same vicinity, but there have been horror stories about these woods for years and years, cause of that lady who disappeared." Gaila and Toni were giving Ken curious looks. He abruptly set his drink down to his knee. "Wait. Don't tell me you don't know about that? That's like...local history 101, doesn't everybody know about it?"

Ken looked to me for some validation; I shrugged. "Sure, I've heard some stuff about that. It happened quite a while ago, right?"

Toni pouted thoughtfully. "I would be more worried about recent murders than an old story about a disappearance." She shrugged, but there was a challenge in it; she wanted the story to be good.

With a mildly protesting shake of his head, Ken said, "Murders are everywhere here though and the thing is, it was just a really _really_ weird case. It also happened back when stuff like that wasn't nearly as common in ND...See, the totally freaky part is that whatever happened to her, her kid was _with_ her."

Toni leaned forward a bit, confused, and Ken almost acted like he was telling a horror story now, getting a little giddy. 

"So, she and her son are staying at some fancy resort, obviously one of the ones that's been taken down by now. Late in the afternoon there's nothing funny, they have dinner and she chats with somebody else in the hotel, yadda yadda, and she takes her son out for a stroll. Later on it's way after dark and somebody comms the cops because they've found this kid just standing in the middle of the woods, practically catatonic, and apparently unable to remember anything that had happened after they left the hotel. He _never_ remembered anything."

Gaila quietly said, "Holy crap."

"And it was before New Dublin had a good amount of technology so there was only so much they could do, but they _combed_ the area. It was hike-only, nobody should have been able to get in there with an actual vehicle...They sent out these search dogs, but the dogs went running until they got to the place where the kid had been found, and then just kind of lost the trail. And this poor kid, it's so screwed up..."

Ken got Gaila's shoulders, both of them grinning devilishly as he twisted her around at the torso. He motioned long cuts very slowly along her back at odd angles.

"He had these long scrapes that had ripped right through his clothes, just like four of five of them."

"Nuh- _uh_." Gaila slapped him off. "You are so full of it."

"I am _not_ making this up—Other than that, he was untouched, he was completely fine. They didn't find blood or remains or anything for the mother anywhere. It's this totally bizarre unexplainable thing, and they never figured out what could have happened to her. It's like...a fairy story. Like something gobbled her up."

There was a stunned little pause. Slowly, Gaila was creeping an arm up around Toni, and then startled her into a tiny shriek by pinching her hard in the ribs. "Ohmy _god_ , I hate you," Toni protested, catching her breath while Gaila laughed.

"The rips in the clothes, though? Really?" I cynically asked. (I had held the case file in my hands. I knew.) "That sounds like something teenagers would make up."

" _Yes_ ," Ken insisted, emphatic. "If you look up the old articles on it, that's what it says."

"So the kid can't remember _anything_?" Gaila said.

I was the one who said, "Keep in mind this happened, I'm not sure, over twenty years ago? If he was going to remember anything useful it would have happened by now."

Ken added, "Yeah, it's kind of weird to think that 'kid' is well into adulthood now. Wherever he is."

"Shit." Toni let out a long breath. She seemed to have forgotten all about her cigarette in her hand. "I just can't imagine what that would do to somebody, you know? And to a child, no less. It could drive you crazy wondering whether you're better off not knowing."

Ken, a little more grim now, said, "I actually thought of this whole thing when they told us Will couldn't remember what had happened."

That almost startled me; I'd been so busy playing civilian ignorance on the subject that I'd forgotten it was something Will could have held a little close to home. I worked with my slight surprise, shrugging and saying, "I wouldn't say that it's the same thing. With me the worst part's over. But God forbid, if one of you had been with me and..."

Toni, wide-eyed with the thought, shook her head.

There was a hissing swish through the trees, wind picking up with a slightly colder edge than it had half an hour before. I swallowed, doing an idle check of the time. "Should we get going?"

Soon after we were mounted up, riding the last mile back to the edge of camp. The breeze almost stung once we were moving faster, the wide path seeming more sliced into a crevice by the headlights and the thicketed background taller and more secretive in the melt of evening.

I'd been on these paths several times before that day, but it took me until I was further gone on the alcohol to even think of it, the last time I'd been out here riding between the trees like this. 

It was a week before Op 86 got wrapped up. I got a comm well after dark from Spock and managed to realize from how he sounded rather than from what he was saying that he'd gone out to the crime scene for some reason and that he needed me to come get him. 

He was far on the other side where the forest cropped into the highway. When I pulled up my bike there and he climbed on behind me I asked him if he wanted to go right home, and he said no. So I took us onto the old bumpy closed-off streets that the city hasn't been troubled to have reconstructed ever since the oldest resorts closed, and we rode. 

I can't even say for how long, but it could have been hours. I'd taken one look at him when I'd first arrived and been worried I wouldn't really know what to do for him, and I kept driving as if I felt like I could suspend everything into some safer blacker limbo than what was waiting for us in the morning, what was waiting for him when he had to be alone with his thoughts again. It was a warm night but at some points I'd felt like he was shivering behind me, and there was the way his arms tightened gradually and firmly around my ribs, the way he set his chin on the nest of my shoulder. When I finally took us back out onto the main road, instead of asking him again if he wanted me to take him to his place, I took him to mine. 

Running into a dead end on a big case is hard; the weather of that one was rough enough to make immaterial things freeze and sharpen in the air, turn gentle atmosphere into obstacles. It was dangerous stuff, but the coldest little treachery of it was that we'd never been closer than how we got during that case; up until that last week, up until that night, if somebody had told me it would be the end of us, I would have laughed and laughed.

"You falling asleep back there?" Ken asked.

"...What?" I yelled back.

I heard him laugh as he nudged into me with his back a little bit. "Nevermind."

 

 

Ken drove us home, and it was Gaila and Toni in the back seat with the windows down, still drunk and windblown. On an impulse, one of them broke out into some song and the other joined in abruptly. There was something that sounded very old about it, some bouncy showtunish melody; they both sang pretty decently but it was the unrehearsed, unharmonized quality that gave it all the charm. After a while Ken stopped cringing at the back seat and started to whistle along. I was half-worried I would be expected to join in, but they didn't last much longer without dissolving into a fit of self-conscious laughter.

"Hey, hey," Gaila said, shaking my seat a little. "Let's comm Danek."

We put my comm on the speaker setting; Danek answered promptly, but took a long time to get a word in between multiple greetings. He had apparently napped for several hours that afternoon and felt wide awake.

" _Daneeek_ , you should seriously go get plastered in anticipation of our arrival," Toni urged. "We're not going to bed for years."

"Hell yeah," Ken said. "Please?" 

Danek made a grudgingly thoughtful noise. "...I may indulge."

"Really?" Gaila put in giddily.

"I'll see what we have."

"Good man," I said with a bit of camp, and heard an affectionate scoff before he clicked off.

When we arrived back, Danek was leaning into the kitchen threshold waiting for us to come up the drive. He did look somehow more relaxed than usual. Ken came in pushing him back by the hips and yelling, "Heyo, Danny-boy!" and he didn't seem to mind all of our noise at all. 

The bag I'd had all day was weighed down too obtrusively by my phaser for me to want to risk leaving it around, so the first thing I did was drop into my room while everyone else was clustering somewhere around the coffee table. I was about to think up my excuse for disappearing for the few minutes it would take to hook up the extra mic when Gaila came swinging into the bedroom, grabbing me by the arms and almost hopping up and down: "Toni says the O'Briens are gone, we're gonna go sneak into their pool!"

"Wha..." I laughed, "Now?..."

"Yeahyeahyeah, come on!"

There was no thought given to any kind of swimwear; most of them were happily possessed with the notion that this intrusion had to be done immediately before anyone changed their minds. The O'Briens lived two houses down, and we cut in through the narrow alley between the vine-veined south side of their house and our direct neighbors' tall white fence. Gaila tripped on something and thumped her elbow hard into the fence in the multi-tasking effort of unbuttoning her shirt. She and Toni sniggered at her clumsiness, Toni clutching her arm, wanting to run. They could barely wait long enough to strip down to their underwear; Toni's narrow jeans tangled on their way down and Ken had to grab her by the arm so that she wouldn't trip and she thanked him through a scoff skidding out of her.

"Are the _boys_ too shy?" Gaila said with a sympathetic pout in Danek's direction, stripped down to her bra and underwear; then she backed up and hopped in fearlessly, coming up with a brief squeal at the cold.

Danek rose to the taunt, chewing his bottom lip and then beginning to undress. Ken and I laughed and followed suit as if it was a race. I had had to be conscious and careful with my clothes for the past weeks, always checking how low my collar was or if the fabric might get thinned by the rain, but now I was hiking up and shedding the t-shirt to be able to reveal nothing underneath, and it felt freeing, as if I was somehow less of a fraud in that moment, less for that one night.

Danek was taking the ladder down while Ken splashed right in; when I was down to my boxers I leapt after him. After enjoying that first tickling cascade of bubbles driving up my body, I surfaced and shook my hair off my face to the swarming giggles, Toni and Gaila splashing at each other. 

It didn't even occur to me to wonder, as I had at first with a lot of their most likely programmed skills, how well they had ever learned to swim. It had become too easy to forget it, that they were miraculously only years old, but still that thought would appear to me now and again in more of a sentiment of their innocence than anything else. 

I will always remember this one moment of a kind of underwater charades, when we all took in a deep breath and submerged all at once, looking about us in the blue-lighted join of the soundless water. We were all mostly naked except for the gauzy blacks and greys, but with each other they were all as confident and unassuming in their nakedness as gods or children, floating in this separated ease from the rest of the world. I felt like they could have breathed underwater if they wanted.

We came up with some of us coughing from laughing at something Gaila had done, which was when Danek shushed us. We heard a car pulling up.

"Shit shit shit," Toni hissed, and we were frantically splashing over to the edges and then out, rushing to get out of sight of the windows; Gaila went for our clothes, but Ken grabbed her away by the arm as Danek tried to kick them out of the illumination of the patio lights before turning to run with us, accidentally almost knocking me over and making me clutch at him to keep from tripping, me helplessly laughing as we kept speeding off around the side of the house. After only a second's blurred hesitation, we sprung up and hopped the fence.

There should have been something ridiculous about all of them as these figures cutting nakedly through the next yard to get to ours. But Danek was impressively quick and non-fussed for a man in nothing but navy boxer briefs, the girls were amused even as they shivered and clutched their arms over their breasts, and Ken was shaking the water out of his hair and laughing at himself for blundering the security code the first time when he was letting us into our back door; we entered the house whooping and laughing, running for the rooms to put anything on. I realized only after changing into my sweats that I hadn't even bothered shutting the bedroom door. Danek apparently hadn't either, and I saw in to meet his eyes just as he was zipping on a hoodie, having moved more leisurely than the rest of us but still touched with a generally flushed look.

"Now that Toni's ambitions for trespassing have been fulfilled," he said, with a look of being fully aware he was being a smartass, "one of us is naturally going to have to volunteer to go collect the clothes."

"Oh," I said, rueful but smiling. "I'll go with you?"

The rest were pretty thankful when they realized what we were doing, and Toni promised to have my favorite cocktail fixed up when we got back. "Thanks, hon," I said to her warmly as we went out through the front this time, planning to sneak in from the side again.

A couple minutes later found me and Danek leaning into the fence, hesitating to creep back onto the patio.

"The light's on in the bedroom," I observed, leaning out from where we were shoulder-to-shoulder in the cramped space. "Should we make a go for it?"

"We could wait a couple minutes," Danek suggested. "See if they're about to go to sleep."

"Okay. You don't think they saw us earlier?"

"It's a conclusion I'm comfortable with," he replied, not looking up from messing with a jam in his zipper, eventually giving up on it with a grumble of "Damn."

I gave a little chuckle, bobbing my leg restlessly but reminding myself that Will didn't have much of an impatient bone in his body, from what I'd seen, and crossing my arms over my chest in a relaxed stance. 

I really was, I realized, more relaxed than I'd been in an extremely long time. I'd begun to feel throughout the day like there was nothing much to be monitored about everyone else. I could have been pondering that Danek's eagerness to get his clothes back meant that that chip might be in his pocket, but it only belatedly occurred to me. I was falling into the feeling that this was my day off, and even while I was conscious of it, it was hard to straighten myself back up. I didn't even think about how loaded a question it was when I muttered, "I have to wonder if we're a little too old for things like this..."

Danek gave a sardonic motion with his head. "Students are students."

"Apparently."

A pleasant wind sighed up around us for a moment. I looked over at Danek, and he looked like he was blinking himself out of some reverie. He asked, "Did you enjoy today?"

"I'm pretty sure Toni's under the impression it's not over," I said, and his expression lightened in agreement. More quietly I then answered, "Yeah. It's the best weekend we've had in a while. Could have used more of you, though."

"You wouldn't find it so regrettable if you'd been around me and my headache all day."

"That bad? I hope it's out of your system by now...Hey," I then said, pointing up to where the window had gone dark.

I collected up my own clothes and any other garment I found strewn around; all impulse to sneak around quietly had dissolved, and we talked freely on the way back around to our house.

"Why?" I grumbled simply, when a car came by busting out music at way too high a volume for this late at night.

"I wonder why the unofficial law is that it's always _that_ kind of music that gets played at ridiculous volumes," Danek said.

I laughed. "Of course. I would die laughing if somebody came around the neighborhood in some muscle car shaking the trees with some Beethoven or..."

With a hum of amusement he interrupted, "You would say that."

"I think Nietzsche would approve."

There was a pause when I thought I'd gotten it wrong. I still didn't get the joke after all, and it had been dangerous for me to try to reference it. 

But then, he remembered. In the dark, it took me a while to realize the sound that came next was him laughing, a low and constant sniggering. He did laugh occasionally, but it was only then I ever heard it like that. 

"Ah, Will...I'd almost forgotten about that." His hand was pressed at my shoulder for a second. With a brief snicker in return, I clapped my hand over his wrist with the arm that wasn't holding a bundle of clothes. With a final sigh Danek was saying, "I think you and I were the reason Professor Lloyd doesn't hold debates in any of his courses anymore..."

I laughed a little more easily as we were pushing the front screen door open. We found everyone in the kitchen and dealt out the clothes. 

"Bottoms up!" Toni said; there was a drink waiting for everyone, and I initiated a wordless toast by tapping my glass against Danek's and there was the tinkling noise of others following suit.

Whatever Will's favorite was, it was strong. I've never sobered up particularly fast and this one was going to set me pretty far back, but I didn't try to make an excuse. I downed the whole thing, let Gaila slap-grab me by the shoulders into what was going to be some brilliant fun idea before the air was interrupted by the lights getting killed, provoking a unison of groans. 

Danek had gone off to somewhere else in the house and was reappearing in the kitchen with a small towel just as this happened, rubbing the water from his ears and his neck. Toni and Gaila and Ken went hopping up to their room to grab a camping lamp or something; I felt too weighed down to go after and sunk my lower back against one of the countertops.

"I'm astonished we still haven't gotten that system fixed," Danek remarked, and then he was bringing the towel up to my hair and rubbing it down for me. I chuckled in surprise at the contact, not having seen that he was about to do it. He rubbed at my ears and then down to where the pressure at the nape of my neck sent the tiniest wave of warmth all over my body, then let the towel drop loose at my shoulders under his hands.

"Yeah," I muttered. "Ken keeps saying if one of us doesn't do something about it soon, he just might stoop to calling a professional. If it wasn't—"

Everything stopped, the kitchen itself gasping to a silence of nothing but the vague thuds of the three upstairs, a smallest bit of breath as faint as the noise of a wick burning. 

I had been kissed like this so few times in my life, as a thing that was hardly an act of passionate urgency but one of those things people do when they think it just has to be done. It was just one bit past chaste and not an action that really needed anything in return. Danek pivoted me into his body and pressed his mouth to mine as if to tell me something rather than ask for something: a slow, warm push until he knew the message got through, and then I was still and dizzy in the darkness of the kitchen with Danek squeezing at one of my hands very briefly, and then he placed both of his on the counter on either side of me just to lean into my space without us touching again, not then, not just yet. Feeling the moment as if it didn't quite matter if I didn't have anything to do or say about this.

My mind was spinning into a whip-sudden clarity that ached through all the drunken stuff, steeling up for what this really meant, not about the operation or about Will but about me. I'd passed a touch to my hand with enough calm in my head for nothing to seem off. Everything about this hiccup could be clean, simple. Danek was not asking me to do anything; he had to be prepared for this to go nowhere, and as far as any kind of sanity is concerned of course nowhere was exactly where it had to go.

But I was being reminded, like a blow to the face, of why I left undercover in the first place. There was little doubt that I could make this alright by skimming out of it with some excuse, but there was also this crystallized undeniable possibility hanging in the air. For just that evening, the absence of the mic was making me weightless with the knowledge that I had nothing underneath but a naked body with the right scars. I wouldn't have, but this is the part I can't overlook: I wanted it. It wasn't so much that I wanted Danek, though I definitely can't say that I didn't. Much more than that, I wanted Will.

And I _could_ have. I only needed to reach out and touch and I knew without a doubt, Danek would lead me into his room and I could cross that line into living another man's life in a way I wasn't even living my own anymore. The only thing I had to do was the wrong thing. It was too much. Too much power for me to have over someone else, even if I never would have used it.

I was swallowing, and then vaguely whispering Danek's name, when the stampede of Toni and Gaila—when had I memorized their footfalls?—preceded Toni yelling something about Ken's sudden determination to fix the back porch step.

I still couldn't read Danek through the dark and hoped he couldn't see me well enough to notice my knowing expression wasn't quite all there. "Gaila, don't take the steps two at a time when it's pitch black in here," I mildly scolded at a yell.

Still only inches from me, Danek may have been patiently chuckling. He was removing one hand from the counter to lean in on only one, still a little close at my side. 

A heavier thudding as Ken came leading down the steps; I felt the briefest brush of Danek's fingers coming around mine again as if in some quick motion of assurance, and pulled my hand back, hoping it came off as a shifting movement oblivious to his. 

I had leaned into the opposite threshold when Toni was hollering down about something else, when I turned and saw Danek in his inscrutable stenciled profile still standing over by the counter, looking like he was looking down at something. I gave a dramatic sigh. "I guess if we can't do anything about the light tonight, we might as well take care of that."

I couldn't tell what Danek was doing or thinking; he looked like he was somewhere else, but then he stood up straight, beginning to move from the counter. 

Realizing then that we were effectively past it, I didn't know what else to do but say, low and with all the sweet easy familiarity I could muster, "Hey." Something simple and reaching because I knew that everything in this house was too close for apologies.

After a moment he just nodded and muttered, "May as well."

I don't remember if I even saw Danek for the rest of the night, which after that was heavily dissolving into the mood where everyone and everything seemed to be circling down a funnel. Toni kept pouring more drinks, and I had no excuse not to make an excuse to insist I'd had enough, but I apparently didn't care. 

I knew in the back of my mind I was supposed to be doing something, but it kept getting lost, shoved aside with varying levels of grumpy deliberation. I probably had plenty of chances to run back and replace the mic kit, but I wanted to forget about it.


	7. Chapter 7

Danek was cleaning.

I woke with my head crammed into the corner of the couch to the varied but constant noises of shifting, scraping, tossing. It didn't immediately occur to me that it could be Danek just from hearing it; it had a stuttered slight rush to it. But I made my eyes open long enough to see Ken and Gaila curled clumsily together on the long futon, and Toni, who'd obviously knocked over into sleep wrapped in a blanket on the floor while trying to stay up watching something on the screen.

I wondered briefly if Will was the type to be irritable enough while hungover to tell him to keep it down, but something in me recoiled with an instinct that it would be a bad idea to engage with him right now. My head was kicking me with every sharp noise, whining from all the light coming in the windows, and it was accompanied by the vague morning-after panic that something had gotten unsettled but it wasn't in my coherence to realize what it was.

I was only half-awake for the first few minutes, but everything was sharpening once I heard whispering, first between Ken and Toni and then all three of them. It was hard to pick up words but there was something stilted and hushed, much more cautious than them just keeping their voices down because they thought I was sleeping. One thing I picked up was in Ken's more faintly audible timbre: "How long has he been up?" and both of them replying that they didn't know with some undertone of incredulity.

A couple minutes later they'd all stirred themselves up; Toni saw that I was awake and gave me a tired smile, motioning for me to hitch my legs up so she could sit on the couch. When she was drawing the blanket tighter around her shoulders she looked at me again and just knocked her glance towards the noise in the kitchen with a general look of _What the hell?_

I shrugged, going wide-eyed to sympathize with the confusion, and mouthed, _I don't know_.

It was hard to put a finger on what felt almost angry about what Danek was doing, but undoubtedly everyone had gotten the impression he was in some kind of mood. He eventually appeared in the living room with a neutrally stony expression. The one thing he said was to Gaila, impatiently asking her to hike up the blanket so that he could see under the futon. As he retrieved a drink glass that had rolled underneath and added it to the others he was collecting, Gaila exchanged a tense look with Toni.

The three of them all looked at me.

My voice was thinned with the morning when I gently uttered, "Danek?..."

He ignored me. In the minute it took him to gather up the few things and leave the room, he didn't look in my direction. It was apparent that this had the rest of them concerned more than anything else, but it also made them speculate less openly and cool their curiosity under some measure of pretense. Toni complained that she needed a cigarette; she still hadn't found hers, so I told her I'd left my pack under the bird bath, I thought, and she yawned her way out the back door.

Gaila and Ken headed upstairs together, I wasn't sure whether to get back into bed or get dressed. Once I was alone, I stood up, and in a slow but dutiful way, followed Danek into the kitchen.

I took the counter opposite the sink and leaned against it, in about the same place I'd been standing the night before after the lights went out. Outside it had gone overcast and the room was less offending to my head but also less familiar in the dark tint, unwelcoming.

I stood there, waiting, having nothing to say while Danek swished out the glasses and clanked them into the wash compartment. Once he kicked the door shut, he ran the water over his rag and wrung it out hard, flung it around the faucet, and then turned to face me.

For a moment we were just looking at each other, his demeanor almost businesslike as he leaned back and crossed his arms. I didn't know why, but my heart had started racing. All around us the house was pulled to a quiet.

Only loudly enough for me to hear, Danek said, "It's strange to look at you now. See, now that I _know_ , it's so obvious. You don't move like him. I'm almost sure you don't even talk like him, not really."

For a second, my biggest panic was to wonder what Chris was going to do, but then I seemed to remember for the first time that morning. No one was listening in. I stood there unable to form any response, wondering what even Danek could possibly be expecting me to do. There was very little established protocol for this kind of thing besides doing what we needed to do to stay alive, and Danek may have been about to do his worst, but he was hardly going to kill me. Even with that, I doubt I could have acted by the book in that moment if my life had depended on it.

"The amount of dedication required to convincingly imitate him must have been exhausting. You studied well, you had us all thoroughly fooled. Job very well done," Danek said, his voice heavily bitter. "Who the hell are you?"

I finally cracked out, "How long have you known?"

"Am I not entitled to some questions of my own?"

"Yes. You are. I'm sorry." I swallowed. "My name is James T. Kirk. I'm a detective."

"...Why did you pick the name?"

"What?" I stammered.

"William. It was an alias of yours, if I'm understanding correctly. I'm curious to know if there was some particular reason you chose that name."

He knew that too. My mind was about to explode, but I managed to reply, "I don't know if I remember...I guess I thought I kind of looked like a Will."

Danek's look was focused with an uncomfortable intensity, looking me over more like I was a painting than a person. "What are you here to investigate?"

I hesitated.

"If the police department is aware of the existence of unregistered clones, they would want to know who made them. I'm asking you whether you're conducting a cloning investigation or a murder investigation."

I understood, after a second, that Danek was asking me whether or not Will was dead. I should have assumed he'd be holding out that small hope: that the entire assault had never even happened, that Will had been discovered some other way and we had him somewhere in custody. I felt like my throat was closing up at first when I tried to speak. "I'm sorry," was all I said.

I didn't even see much of his reaction before the back door bumped open and then Toni was crossing into the kitchen in a seeming flurry of indecently normal movement, Danek turning away and leaning his hands into the edge of the sink. She was opening the fridge, asking me before she bothered to look if I'd eaten all of the yogurt, apparently tossing aside the tension from earlier after deciding she wouldn't concern herself with it.

I might as well have forgotten she'd said anything a second after she asked; it felt almost impossible to pull myself together, but she looked over, cocking an eyebrow at me. I probably only seemed irritable: "Sorry, I don't know."

I thought she was about to mildly huff out of the room, but Danek had turned back around. "Toni, come here."

"Hmm?" She'd grabbed a carrot and crunched a bite off of it as she walked over in response to Danek's casual beaconing gesture. At the moment he was doing better at this than I was, his expression softened completely as he took her by one arm with a slight frown.

"Did this happen in the pool?" He was pointing out a long deep scrape on her arm, brushing his finger along it faintly.

"Oh. Yeah. I slipped when we were getting out."

"Did you put something on it?"

She sighed. "No. I'll take care of it in a minute." I couldn't see her face, but there was something that hesitated, wondering about him. I had the impression she was slightly surprised by the concern, maybe almost touched. Danek brushed his hand along her arm and then shook it in a brief little gesture of affection before she turned and walked out, only shrugging in my direction.

Danek and I moved downstairs. It was rare that anyone was ever in the basement for more than half a minute and the rest would more quickly assume we'd gone for a walk than think to check down there if they were looking for us. There was one little rickety chair that seemed to only be there because they didn't want it anywhere else, but neither of us sat down, opting to lean against the books.

I was the first to speak, finally. "The chip?..."

Danek's brow lowered. "You don't know what it is, do you?"

He seemed extremely troubled by the idea that I might somehow know. I quickly shook my head. "All I know is what you said after the Nichols meeting. I just assumed it was...maybe something he needed you to look at but only in the event of his death or maybe being seriously injured..."

"You presumed correctly," Danek said, but didn't yet show any eagerness to go on.

After a long moment I said, "So Will knew."

"I've hidden the chip," Danek suddenly offered. "You won't find it. If you want to know its contents, there are some things you will have to do for me."

I was about to mull that over, but he didn't care to give me a chance to talk.

"First of all, I presume there is some exit strategy you had planned to keep all of this very clean? Did you plan on staging some sudden death for Will?"

It gave me a weirdly chagrined feeling, just standing there and nodding. "He was supposed to switch antibiotics and have some severe reaction..."

"I thought it was ridiculous, the antibiotics, that you were taking them at all," he said in a quick irritable way, as if only to himself. "It's only for certain allergies that it even becomes necessary anymore...I assume this would have given you necessity to leave very soon?"

I sighed. "There hasn't been a very frank discussion of it yet, but I have a feeling my boss doesn't think this is leading anywhere all that useful. All he wants is one lead, really, but..." I shrugged.

"If there's anything you can do about it, I want you to remain in the house for at least...four days more," Danek decided. "And I want you to protect the pretense that you are in fact Will. I don't want the others to know that they have been living with an impostor."

"If you tell me everything you can," I said, "I will try."

He looked me up and down again in a way I chose to interpret as dubious.

"Really," I said firmly.

Danek went on in an almost bored manner. If it wasn't for the fact that he had a bit of vitriol against me, he'd remind me of the best kinds of interviewees, the ones who are grateful enough just to be kept talking so that they can dwell on the hard technical facts rather than their emotional states. "Will gave me the chip...I believe it was last summer. He said that it contained a video note from him and that only in the event of his death was I to ever look at it. I was obviously unable to be _entirely_ certain that Will was gone, so I suppose I broke my promise, but once I watched it I...understood that my suspicions were very likely to be correct."

"Did the others know about it?"

"No." Danek considered something for a while, carefully. "I presume now it's possible he thought he could trust me better than any of the others not to let my curiosity get the best of me. I don't think he ever _asked_ me to keep it a secret, but I thought we had an understanding. It's meant to be my prerogative whether I keep it all a secret just as he did, now that I've inherited the truth."

He looked down for a moment, long enough for me to wonder if I should press him on, but then continued.

"What Will told me in the recording is that we are all genetic copies of living individuals...I didn't at first understand that it was possible his source would appear to be the same age, but apparently there are artificial aspects to us too. 'Cyborgs,' as Will's book collection might call us," he said with a strange smile. "So many of his interests make sense to me in a different way now...Will did not say where we came from, or who created us. You must understand, we don't remember."

Danek didn't seem to expect me to grasp this, but I nodded.

"But he did. As he told it, we were able to access the technology that had given us the information our minds were too young to have naturally gathered, and we...used it subversively."

Wait. "...You chose to alter your own memories?"

"Apparently our experiences had been so terrible as to be unbearable to carry. Our treatment at whatever place produced us, as Will put it vaguely, was 'a redefinition of inhumane.' When we had access to the ability to make ourselves forget, we apparently decided it had to be done. That the only way for us to ever be free was to not only forget where we'd come from but to have no idea that we were anything but normal. It sounds very foolish, doesn't it? And yet..."

He paused for a while, and his next words came from a different place.

"The worst thing that I can remember is the day I told my father I wanted nothing to do with Vulcan's values and that I was leaving to come live here. He told me that if I did so I would no longer be his son. It is my most painful memory, and it never even happened. And I'm to understand I inflicted this onto myself, we all did this, so that we would never want to go home again. We needed to be oblivious to the fact that we had no homes, except for with each other.

"That was the other thing...We would have rather lost each other than been unable to be normal; we did believe, Will said, that we could find other people to befriend. We could be happy. But then, what if something began to seem strange, and one of us began to catch on to being different? Or someone outside started to suspect one of us, and we weren't even together? He said that was the absolute worst fear for some of us. And it apparently seemed the natural decision, that one of us would have to 'stay behind,' as he put it. Even if that person could only watch over the others from afar, it would be better than nothing. So, he remembered. He always remembered everything. He was responsible for bringing us together. And I assure you..."

He shook his head for a few seconds, incredulous.

"That part probably seems as impossible to you as it does to me. I always knew he was brilliant with computers, but think about it: The documentation for our identities was already there, but he would have had to submit all of our applications, tamper with orientation schedules, fake his own qualifications as a second-year student and somehow, without the advantage of quite as much fabricated intelligence as the rest of us have, been accordingly passable as a history student. And in addition to that, he was...I'm willing to say, as instinctive with people as you apparently are. There was definitely a certain grasp he seemed to have with other people, but I never would have imagined that he already knew us. Much of our coming together again must have been pure dumb luck, but at the same time, it could have happened drastically differently with a less clever man."

"And you're absolutely certain," I asked, "that he was the only one who knew?...Did Will mention all of you by name?"

Danek looked directly at me for the first time in a long moment. "Why do you ask?"

I wasn't sure whether this would be bad news for him or not, and felt hesitant, letting out a sigh before I said, "We have documentation proving that everyone in this house was named under a false identity that was used as an undercover alias. Except for Gaila."

He looked like he didn't understand why this should matter to him.

"We don't know if she's anyone's copy."

"Gaila is one of us," he said. The certainty was immediate, unwielding.

"Are you sure? Did he mention her by name in the recording? Did he say how _many_ of you there were from the start?..."

Danek wouldn't reply. I sighed again in agitation.

"Can I _see_ the chip?"

"I did not promise you that," he pointed out. "That's a different deal."

I shoved my hands into the pockets of my sweats, exasperated.

"If you arrest the man who killed Will," Danek said, "I'll give you anything you want."

I raised my hands apart in the air, and my voice kept rising higher in frustration. "You need to help me. I feel like there's got to be something related to all of this, with what happened to him, but we've got nothing. Is there anything that none of you would have told the police, anything suspicious, anything at all?...There has to be _someone_ in this house who has some idea of who might want him dead, and I have a feeling if someone does it would have to be you."

I looked hard into Danek's eyes as, for the moment, there was something dark and very sad there. It was a long moment before he slowly shook his head. "I have no idea."

After a silence, I saw his wheels turning, and decided not to interrupt even when it took him almost a minute to speak again.

"The only thing that might be of use to you...One of the stranger things about Will was that he was extremely distrusting of...superiors, is how I used to think of it, but now I think it was specifically the law. We once had the car broken into and he wouldn't hear anything about it when I wanted to report it to the police. It was one of the few things that could make him considerably bad-tempered. I think we were all confused by it, but it was against our rules to ask about it."

I nodded. "Now you're thinking he was afraid of all of you being discovered?"

"Yes. Perhaps this was even the reason we wanted us to stay here rather than attempting to emigrate out of the city...Too many concerns about customs, the fear that having officials pore over our records might make somebody sense that something was amiss about us. It all makes sense if, after all, his experiences had taught him that we would only be treated as if we were contraband, once someone suspected us." Danek was frowning, his eyes distantly fixed towards the small amount of light from the sliver of a high window. "Considering your actions, Detective Kirk, I wonder if he had a point."

That was completely fair, and I shouldn't have felt like somebody might as well have punched me in the gut. "Listen, you can hate me all you want, but understand that we still would have done this even if all of you weren't...if you were regular citizens."

"It's difficult to take your word for it," he said coldly. "You have to admit that there is some contradiction, after all, between the interests of trying to find a person who would create us and trying to punish the one who would end our supposedly illicitly produced lives."

"I don't think it's a contradiction at all, actually," I protested, but my voice was flat, like I didn't think I could really get anywhere with him. "Why did you ask me to stay for four more days?"

"Because," he said, almost shrugging, "I want to see if there is any way it can help. Perhaps I share your hunch, in a way. It should be easier to pry when you don't have to worry about fooling one of us."

I thought about it a second. "You should probably know that I'm usually geared with a surveillance mic. I don't have one on now, but..."

"Hmm." He considered that with a neutral look of calculation. After a moment, he turned the subject back. "I'm assuming there's a more external investigation as well?"

"Yes," I said with a sigh. "There's a possibility, you should realize, that the person who killed him is some criminal with a grudge against me rather than him. But if they'd turned up any big leads on that, I would've been told by now."

"Yes, surely," Danek said, nodding. There was a subtle sarcasm in it, but I didn't immediately understand what he might be getting at. Then, not-so-subtle: "The search has clearly been arduous, in fact, I did find myself marveling at how often Will had been leaving the house lately. It felt very out of character, but I imagine one has to make of their operations what they can."

Something from his eyes, ill-willing, shifted right into me with a shake. I wasn't about to try to tell him that all it was was that I had a protective guy running my job. "If you're trying to say we haven't been putting as much effort into finding the killer..."

"All I'm saying, Detective Kirk," he said, "is that your superior officer may believe he already has his 'big lead.' After all, if your presence here is to work as a snare for potential murderers, it's obvious you've done little with that potential, assuming the options haven't already been narrowed down."

"So that's your problem. I haven't thrown up the bait quite enough?"

Danek, his face so cleared of any obvious emotion that it was like a curt dismissal, shrugged again. There was a long moment, and then he quietly said, "I can imagine you find my lack of obvious shock to this entire situation a bit suspicious."

After a second I only mildly shook my head. "I wouldn't say suspicious."

"Are you sure?" he responded dryly. "Because I am probably a criminal, even if everything I'm saying is true. From what I told you of Will's message, don't you think the natural conclusion is that one of us had to kill someone to be able to escape from our captivity? And there's the question of where all the money came from. We must have stolen it. And then, you may not believe me anyway, because I'm a man who supposedly only found out last night that he is a robotically implemented genetic clone, that his entire life up until less than two years ago is a falsehood, and that one of the very few people he has ever cared about is dead. A lot of people who meet me believe that I react unnaturally to some things; I can hardly imagine this would be an exception."

"I don't," I said, and then cocked a brow, mumbling, "Hell, for a Vulcan, you could almost tone it down a little."

"For a Vulcan." For a second, his eyes looked at me piercingly, and I almost wondered if he was seeing something I hadn't meant to let on. He gave a thoughtful hum and continued slowly. "In any case, what I'm trying to make you understand is that in some way, I already knew. I think there's always been a feeling among the house that there's something different about us. It doesn't quite have the impact for me that it probably would for you, learning that so many of my memories aren't real. They never felt as genuine to me as I imagine memories are supposed to; for much of the time I assumed that was simply what it was like, to hate your own life up to a point so deeply, but at other times I did wonder if it could mean something else. The reason I'm telling you this is because I can only hope, if you find some reason to haul me into a courtroom or in for some interrogation, that some understanding will be applied to my general affect. It's hard to say, but I don't believe...the emotional control would be quite the same for the others, which is why I must keep this from them, at least until they have less to deal with."

There was a long pause before I could only nod a quiet promise, and after that, a pensive hesitation thickened in the air. Danek sounded quite different when he spoke next, more reflective and careful.

"I knew that he was dead," he said, along something too sad to be a sigh. "I only needed to be shown."

I didn't know then, and still don't, what it was that gave me away to Danek. I wanted badly to know but I wouldn't dare ask; it seemed like something too private, too sacred even. I thought that the answer had to be something buried so far inside of Will that no amount of information or observation could ever make me understand it. It may not have even been only one thing, really; Danek had seemed to think there was something strange going on a couple times, after all.

From the beginning we'd had the uncanny on our side, the fact that even if I'd seemed out of the ordinary, no one oblivious to the truth would think to assume that Will was acting differently because Will wasn't Will. But at the end I realized one of the most glaring features that made Danek so different from Spock: His mind had no inclination for denial. I had contorted too far and one too many times, and it had somehow become impossible for him to accept that I was Will, even before he'd watched what was on the chip, before he'd had anything more than a wicked little hunch to make him suspect what it could possibly be.

Now, you're thinking that it had to be the kiss. I think I was almost sure at first that that was it, and I can't say with any certainty that it wasn't that, but then I have to ask myself: Was it the way I'd done it? Was it the fact that I'd stopped, or that I'd started in the first place? In my most affectionate interpretation, I wonder if Danek already had me pegged then, and was just fucking around with me. To that I'd have to smirk and say that screwing with my head was perfectly fair game. But I don't know.

Much later, later enough that I have to suspect it was partly me beginning to project myself and my own life onto the situation, I couldn't stop thinking about that last moment before I moved from the counter. When his hand reached automatically to find mine slipping away, no longer waiting for him.

I cannot for the life of me describe even from speculation what Danek and Will's relationship was like, if they'd ever kissed before or how many times, if they'd even done more than that; I think it's hard for me to shake the idea that once Will was gone it was all just as fragmented to Danek, that it was something just as much more rooted in feeling than in actions. But while I don't think the way that someone kisses makes for much of a thumbprint, I think about how I couldn't see Danek's expression when his hand reached to where he expected my hand to still be, and I wonder if that had been the jolt, if I'd appeared to him like something so starkly mutated in that moment that the truth was undeniable. I've wondered many, many times, if that was it.

 

 

At long last, I'd put the mic back on. I had an angry and somewhat frantic message waiting for me from Chris, but I couldn't reply to it. I had to get my head together and figure out what the hell I was going to say to him when we got the chance to talk, and as much as it made me feel guilty to think of it this way, I knew he had to be pissed I'd made him worry late into the morning and that giving him several hours to cool off would be a lot kinder to myself. I was suddenly getting levels of jitters like I'd never even had my first month on the job; I didn't know how much I could deal with at once.

The day passed. Most of the residents had a good deal of work to catch up on, but looking around me I wasn't sure much of them were getting all that much accomplished. The tension that the rest had probably explained away as some exclusive spat between me and Danek had tinged the air more thoroughly than I expected. It was like the ideal peace that usually hung between everyone had been thrown off by the one little imbalance.

At one point Danek went to sit on the couch where Gaila had stretched out; she was making to sit up, but he just lifted up the bottoms of her legs and sat, letting her feet rest on his lap as he opened up his reader. Just after she got back to her reading, he gave a rub and squeeze to one of her feet. She put her book down for a second to give him some teasingly suspicious expression, but then he gave a warm smile and she just laughed softly and got back to work. I saw it differently: I saw the look on Danek's face, genuinely sweet but edged with a kind of grave desperation that only I would have thought to watch for. I knew that the others had to be the only thing holding him down. It only seemed natural that he would be reaching to touch them more than usual.

Everyone was a bit more talkative once we put on some documentary Toni had been assigned and Ken was doing some imitations of the narrator's odd choices of diction. For once I didn't have much of anything better to do than work on some reading as convincingly as possible; the company had tapered down to Gaila and Danek and me, and since Gaila was doing the same Civil Wars reading, we kept quoting to each other the very self-congratulating memoirs of the "warlord" Tuk-Hon. Before, joking with the others had come easy, but that night it felt like pulling a complicated stunt.

When it was late and Gaila made her exit, I felt like I was catching my breath. Danek, not even looking my way, slapped his reader closed and retired to his room, leaving me alone.

 

 

"What the fuck happened last night?!"

Chris had not cooled down as much as I'd stupidly hoped; he'd no sooner picked up the phone than was snapping about protocol and "For all I'd known you could have been stabbed by somebody."

"Jesus, you still had the room bug, you had to know it was no big deal." I pulled my best blasé, hoping to hell I could actually fool Chris on this one. "I was about to change up last night and then they wanted to jump in the pool, so it's kind of a good thing I didn't have it. After that I went right to bed. I'm sorry I didn't check in."

"You're sorry," he said back in huffy sarcasm. "Anything happen I should know about?"

"I don't think so."

"Jim." I heard some hesitant breathing. "I'm thinking you should be done soon."

I stupidly froze right in my steps. "What."

"You've done good work, but I think we've got everything we're going to get. Tomorrow, I want you to get a serious stomachache and have somebody take you to the hospital, we'll wait till—"

"No," I protested, my voice flat with shock. "No, no no no, what, you're giving up _now_? We've got practically fuck-all!"

"And I don't think we're going to get anything else, and I'm getting increasingly anxious about hanging you out to dry when there isn't good enough reason for it."

"Look, just give me a few more _days_ , Chris. That's it."

"Jim," he said steadily, and there was something grimly authoritative that hadn't been there a second ago, "unless there's something you're not telling me about, I don't see how something could suddenly turn up in less than a week."

I looked back towards the house, at the little window to Danek's bedroom where the lamplight was still glowing. I turned back and walked farther into the trees. I said nothing.

"That's what I thought," Chris said. "I want you out, Jim. I'm sorry."

I had to count back from three before I said it. "No."

Undercovers don't get to call any of the shots, not really, but when it comes down to it, there's very little that they can _make_ you do once you're in. There could be hell to pay once I walked out willingly, and yeah, there were ways I could be forcibly removed, but I was hauling a pretty confident gamble that Chris wouldn't be willing to do that. It would probably involve rather theatrically endangering my cover, and try as he might to be a hardass, I knew that with at least some of the residents, putting them through all that really wasn't something he wanted to do.

After a few seconds, Chris repeated back, " _No_?"

I didn't respond.

"You're disobeying a direct order. I could have your badge taken away in a _minute_ if I gave this recording to someone else. Just so we're clear, this is what you're doing."

"Crystal."

After that was just a long pause, Chris rising to fuming levels of frustration and finally barking, " _Dammit_. What the hell is going on in there?!"

Even though I was outright refusing to leave, explaining things to him wouldn't have made things any prettier. The idea that I was in collaboration with one of the residents would have Chris uneasily questioning my objectivity if not my sanity, and keeping him in the dark could make the difference between it being both of us or just me in trouble with the higher-ups farther down the road if this wound up getting messy. "It's nothing you need to worry about. Just trust me on this one."

"'Nothing to worry about.' Go screw something. If you're not telling me, that means it's something dangerous, and you're telling me not to worry about it?"

"As if there's any way I can convince you it's not dangerous," I complained in an angered growl. "You think that Gaila killed Will."

Now that that had landed, Chris took a deep breath. He slowly drawled, "I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that you don't."

The worst thing was that I could see the whole line of logic very clearly from his end: the Orion blood in the alleyway, the fact that she hadn't been home until late the night he was murdered, the fact that no one could prove she wasn't hundred percent humanoid. From the viewpoint that she was some lonely troubled outcast who'd decided to turn to the black market and collect herself a family, it was a plain motive: Will somehow coming upon something about her that she couldn't have him telling anyone else and her desperately having to waste him. I could imagine the dramatization through Pike's suspicions, with her making up some reason to have him come with her out there that night, waiting until there was no one around. The ineffectual resistance of a victim too confused to really fight back against Orion muscle, getting him easily square in the gut, finding somewhere to dispose of the weapon, and then going on home. Even the nightmares made some kind of sense: Particularly if somebody's never killed before it can shake them up badly, and it all smacked of the kind of sneaking guilt somebody might have after killing somebody they'd been trying to convince themselves wasn't really a person. Even when I couldn't possibly believe it was true, the whole idea of it made me feel sick.

"You can't twist this like I've been holding out on you, Jim," Chris said. "Any detective worth a damn would feel edgy about this, and you may not want to believe it, but you know exactly why I do."

"It's just _different_ from my end, okay? You don't see all the things that I see, she's—"

"Wake _up_ , Jim. I know you're a softy for the girl but you have to seriously consider the possibility that she may be willing to _kill_ you. That night you caught her off guard in the yard her heart was doing light speed, she was _way_ too antsy around you to not be—"

"She's not antsy, she's _traumatized_." I was yelling so loudly I checked back toward the house to make extra sure no one was outside. "I don't know why. But I'd bet my life on it."

"Well, congratulations. You're betting your job on this."

"Fine. I want four days." I heard a vague grunt, and went on, "I'll keep my gun on me as often as possible, even in the house, if it makes you feel better."

"Four days. Fine," he said after a moment. "But if you pull _anything_ again like your slack-off last night, I will come in there and drag you out myself."

A second later Chris had hung up. I flipped my comm shut and then kept meandering numbly through the park, and tried to will my hands to stop shaking. The wind had picked up to a chill and I wasn't sure if I was shivering from the cold or some weak variant of anger. I'd gone head to head with superiors before without really sweating it, but with Chris it was different. I had no idea if things could be okay with us if I ended up somehow tarnishing his reputation or forcing him to have me sacked.

It was a few minutes before I took Will's comm back out of my pocket and punched the number in to call Bones, thankful I'd entered it manually enough times to have it memorized. I knew that he'd probably be sleeping around this time, but on the off-chance that I woke him up I figured this was worth the bother.

I had no idea what I was going to say if he picked up. It would have made a lot of sense if I wanted to pour my heart out about how the entire damn operation was looking to end up being a total waste, but I really felt at that moment like I would have given up a limb just to sit and talk about nothing in particular with someone who really knew me. I'd only been in the house for weeks, but it felt way longer than that. This is the kind of thing that makes or breaks you in UCD: Time gets stretched out by the exhaustion of being constantly on your game, and after months to years of it it's almost worse than being literally alone, that you spend so much time with other people and none of them know who you are. You get homesick for yourself.

I don't know how many times it beeped before I made myself accept that Bones wasn't going to pick up. I rocked tiredly backwards until I was tucked in with my back against a tree trunk, and stared down the comm with a blank look.

Before I could really let myself think about it I had started dialing another number. When the alert started beeping I was hunched over in the wind, my eyes trained on the raspy movement of the leaves on the ground.

I had the comm pressed tight at my ear and my left knuckles clamped firmly against my lips as if I was afraid to so much as open my mouth. When the answer came, I don't think I even breathed.

"Detective Spock." His voice was perfectly neutral; it was impossible to tell if he'd been sleeping. My grip around my comm tightened in even more. It was like I thought that if I could only hear the background static a little better I would somehow be able to visualize him, in his open sterile kitchen with the steam aroma of tea from the kettle, or sitting up attentively on his bed looking one notch too formal for a man in his pajamas. I wanted to smell his laundry soap. "Hello?..."

His tone was a little more offhand; I knew any second now he was going to end the call. But then there was some shift of air: I could almost feel him stilling, and the word was low and urgent, his voice smaller now:

"Jim?"

I hung up in a rush, as if I'd been spooked.

After finally tucking the comm back into my pocket, I crossed my arms, walked back up through the yard and around to the front of the house and just went up and down the block.

Arriving back at the driveway later, I saw movement up at the window of the loft. Danek was in there sitting across from Ken on his bed, their heads bowed over something and Ken smirking in response to a comment from Gaila who had her back leaned into the edge of the window. A vague motion in the background must have been Toni putting some things away.

For a minute I had the strongest, impossible urge to just walk away from the house forever, as if I could pull the last weeks out of the bedrock with my departure and leave them to each other. It reminded me of that irrational desire even an experienced cop will get sometimes when they see a dead body, to just lay the blankets over and give them their last peace instead of doing all the poking and prodding. We hadn't had the decency to let Will lie, and at that moment I felt like I would have done almost anything to take that back and leave the rest of them alone.

But I had made a promise. After some minutes I somehow got myself put back together, shoved my hands into my jacket pockets, and went back inside.


	8. Chapter 8

"Will?" Danek lightly called out from where he was stretched on the couch.

"What?" 

"Could you summarize the four tenets of Jo'bradi's Justice?" he asked casually. "I'm not sure the T.A. really knew what she was talking about and I know it was of some interest to you when your class was on the subject."

"Your PADD's right here," Toni commented, lifting it up off the coffee table.

"Thank you, but Will has a good memory for the more significant points," he replied, making Toni shake her head as if she wanted to make some remark about laziness.

No one was looking at me so I was free to have a grumbling expression for one second before I said, "The first is equal distribution of power. The second is effective distribution of power. The third is fluidity of the definition of power according to the amount and type of resources; fourth is the same but according to word of the gods. The fourth was eventually modified under Palto's reign."

As I'd been talking I'd seen the flinch in Danek's expression, a mix of irritation and chagrin he didn't let anyone but me see. In another elusive moment I shot him back a look that attempted to say, _We don't have to play that game, do we?_

He was being a pain in the ass, often and deliberately. He wasn't trying to throw me off my front with the fastballs, of course he didn't want to, but as much as he needed me to keep playing along around all the others I think it was hard for him to passively watch. I kept thinking I noticed him stiffening when I spoke to or especially when I touched any of the others, and he kept demanding my attention as if to momentarily keep me away from them.

This reflex of his was enough to put my anxiety right through the roof without the feeling attached to it that wasn't a sense of something lethal but something risky enough to make my instincts prickle into vigilance. You never know how people will react to intrusions, but it's a rare thing, the type of rage that would make Danek shoot back with such cold and precise intellect as he did, a defensive boldness underneath it that could have burned much hotter if he understood less than he did. 

I shouldn't have automatically felt more uneasy about being around the others, but I remembered the story Toni had told me— _Something's happened to Will_ —and I wondered if those chilling instincts of theirs made them feel it in their bones, how hard they'd had to work for where they were. I could only imagine what it would have been like if I'd made a much greater and much more obvious mistake, if four heads at once had turned in my direction with the knowledge that there was a stranger in their fortress.

Overall I think there was a general vibe the others were getting that something was still a bit crooked between me and Danek, but I almost got the impression that the two having fights wasn't as entirely unprecedented as I'd imagined and the other three were only used to not considering it any of their business. 

The thing that revved the tension back up was later when, with a sort of inappropriate levity in how he said it, Danek suddenly declared, "Will wants us to go visit the place where he was attacked."

It was like he'd said something blatantly absurd; everyone was taking a break over a batch of pastries Gaila had just made, and the atmosphere was immediately sucked dry into wide, confused eyes.

"He told me he was hesitant to bring it up, but that he'd like to see if he's able to remember anything. And he would like us all to come."

I'd been waiting for something like this, but it would have been nice to have gotten a warning. I was forcing myself not to look nearly as surprised by this as the others were and hopefully was hitting the right note of shyly agreeing.

"Are you sure?" Toni asked me.

I shrugged. "I don't want it to be all depressing, of course." I sheepishly grinned at Gaila's knowing rolling of eyes. "We could get something to eat while we're out there. I really didn't want to go without any of you..."

"Sure." Ken nodded. "Sure. But, this isn't something the cops are kind of pressuring you to do, is it?"

I shook my head earnestly. Something in Danek's expression was more careful than before, and I couldn't help feeling a little favorable towards him when he added, "I'm only assuming you haven't changed your mind."

"No..." I met his eyes steadily, and then nodded at everyone. "We'll go."

 

 

I'd never been to Peggy's, but the pie was to die for, apparently literally, since so many people seemed willing to brave the neighborhood despite its reputation. Then again over half of their customers were Orions, who generally had less reason to be nervous around the gang areas.

In keeping with my word to Chris, my phaser was strapped in my holster and I had to keep my jacket on so that no one would notice, and I hoped no one was going to ask me how I wasn't getting hot wearing it. This worry dissolved with the constant tension I saw around the table that took up all the mental space. Danek was playing along with it to an extent, unless it was his own actual emotional state that was making him have a hard time touching his food, which it may well have been.

Gaila was the most fearlessly friendly with the waiter as well as with the occasional loud crowd that passed by the table and greeted us in variably inappropriate ways. It occurred to me we might have been made to feel unwelcome here if it weren't for her, but I didn't want to jump to that assumption.

"I don't feel like I've been in here," I said, shaking my head after Ken asked me about it. "But I don't know why I would have been anywhere else. Dammit, I don't _know_. It's going to drive me crazy."

I didn't even know whose foot it was that nudged comfortingly against mine. "It's okay, babe," Gaila was saying. "It's not your fault you can't figure it out."

I let out a sigh, setting my fork down and keeping my eyes fixed at nothing in particular, putting up an appearance of distant, private frustration. I eventually said, "I should apologize. None of you want to deal with this, and I brought us all out here..."

"Hey, don't get like that," Ken muttered. "You've got nothing to be sorry for."

I had already observed that this whole thing seemed to be particularly bothering Gaila, but it took me completely by surprise when I looked over at her: At some point she had started crying. She was going about trying to hide it in the way I remember doing when I was a little kid, simply acting like it wasn't happening so that someone might assume she just had something in her eye. She kept dipping her potato wedges and cramming them into her slightly trembling mouth. 

I was pretty sure everyone had noticed. Toni opened her mouth to say something, but then didn't when Ken on her left simply reached and took Gaila's hand off the table, squeezing it and setting it on his lap. She seemed to feel better then; I wondered what was wrong with everybody to practically ignore it after that, but maybe I subjectively saw something in it they didn't see. It was a particular frustrated way I'd seen people cry more often in DV than anywhere else, the way somebody cries when they're trying with all their might to not be afraid. I thought of my argument with Chris all over again, and I realized for the first time how completely fucked up I was going to be about it if this op didn't turn up a damn thing. It added a sturdy weight to what I was doing, like I could go without sleeping for the next few days and not even care as long as I found _something_. 

Later that night we went home, and I waited until the lower part of the house was all clear; well after everyone was in bed, I took the car all the way back out to Peggy's. 

The alleyway was still lined with tape in only the middle area. I stepped under to pass through, feeling an out-of-place tingle there even though I did have my badge on me. I remembered the place pretty vividly, but it seemed wider than before, more of a place that swallows you into the shadows. 

It was still a total mystery what had brought Will out here. It wasn't like a civilian would have to be suicidal to come poking around; people do things that are stupid and reckless all the time, things that they can't really explain when it comes under scrutiny, even when they would normally be more careful. But coming all the way out to the area by himself, actually aiming for it, didn't seem at all like Will. I had no idea what I was really doing, only that I'd felt a restless pull that brought me back here and was now recklessly trying to retrace another man's steps and suss out something, anything.

Someone had to have either pulled or pushed Will out here, and if it wasn't Gaila, that led me back to our initial impression that he might have been meeting somebody here. If only we had any reason to believe the group was in any way desperate for money, but when their funds were pooled, they seemed comfortable to the point of it being suspicious. Danek had all but confirmed that. But while I couldn't think of any reason for it, I felt it was the best explanation; I wanted badly for there to be someone who might just be waiting for Will to show his face around here. 

I went under the tape on the other side of the alley and went through to the street opposite from where I'd walked in. It was more crowded than I'd expected from the amount of noise that was around, which made the atmosphere all the more formidable. A woman and a man were just a couple yards away, wearing clothing that gave me the impression they worked at one of the clubs, and they gave me crude cards-down looks as I came by. Just up ahead a couple was passing, clutched together but folded in with what looked like a tense whispered debate. I heard a nasal cackling through the window of an apartment complex. 

There was one figure standing at the corner of the block: somebody tall and thin and hunched over, and I couldn't tell if he was looking for something down the street or right at me, but by the time I got up closer it was decidedly the latter. He had a loose jacket on with the hood obscuring his face, and I couldn't even quite tell what color skin he had. I ended up stopping, just looking at him, feeling a few hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

The moment suspended there for a few seconds: then his feet shifted, and he grunted, "D'I know you, man?"

"...No."

Sounding annoyed, he added, "I haven't got anything, if you're looking to buy some kicks."

"Nah, take it easy," I said. "Sorry."

After that I could only shake my head at myself and meander in a defeated mood all the way around the block, eventually putting out my cigarette and heading back to the car.

 

 

Danek was feeling as aggressive as I was: Two days later, he pulled me back to the diner yet again.

The excuse was that Will wanted to get a look at the actual crime scene and that this would be much less creepy when there was still daylight left; the real reason of course was that it may have seemed like a good idea to hit an earlier time of day than before.

Before we left, I caught Gaila alone.

"If you aren't okay with this, you can stay home," I muttered softly, holding her back by the shoulder for a second while I got into my jacket.

She checked up the stairway, then looked right at me. What I saw in her eyes wasn't quite readable; I felt like there was something significant in that she had no confusion about what I'd meant. For that second I sensed something I couldn't name; I wanted to grab her, say "No, dammit, are you okay? What's going on?" and dig to the bottom of it, but I knew I couldn't: Will wouldn't. After a second all she did was look down at her feet and brush off the worry. I felt that little wham of surprise at her insecurity, sensing the self-dismissal in whatever she was putting aside.

"It's fine," she finally said. I nodded, and there at the bottom of the stairs, she quickly tipped up and kissed me on the cheek.

Later at the diner, Danek was saying to me, "I thought you hated vinegar." I was forking at my salad and everyone stopped what they were doing to cock an eyebrow in my direction.

"I don't feel either way about the dressing," I said, telling myself not to roll my eyes, shrugging instead. I looked over and Ken was still mildly brooding at my plate. A little more irritably I insisted, "It's the smell I don't like."

Toni dissolved it by chuckling. "It's like Gaila and onion rings. Can't make her mind up about them."

"It's an ongoing scientific evaluation, _okay_ ," Gaila said in mock indignation. "I'll start making charts."

Ken grinned around his toothpick, looking somewhere up to the side. I met eyes with him and we shared a subtle private laugh.

When we were done eating I agreed to walk around the block to the other side of the alley after Danek suggested it. There would have been little point to this even if I was really Will, but none of the others felt like challenging it. Gaila turned out to be much less nervous this time around for whatever reason. I was beginning to think I'd imagined that there was something particularly jarring about it for her, that before she must have just been having a jolt of thinking too hard about what happened to Will for the first time in a while.

We wound up close to this worn-down playground that seemed like an artifact of a time when it might have been a decent area for kids to mess around in. Gaila seated herself on a rust-faded elephant-shaped chair that rocked back and forth. "Picture!" she demanded, pulling Toni in next to her. I took it on Will's compact, careful not to let anyone see my firearm as I replaced it in one of my inner pockets. 

We were all scuttling through a quieter street back to the parking lot, now in better moods, when a large vehicle went from a slow idle to a stop and a green face with long hair popped out. A deep voice yelled at Gaila, "Got a light, little _b'cheni_?"

She slowed and gave the driver a subtly admonishing look, but then turned to Toni, who was already tossing her her lighter. Danek said Gaila's name in a cautioning way, but Gaila was already going up to hand it to the guy.

I saw that the car had started moving before I realized he'd grabbed her by the wrist and was pulling her with him. Gaila was thrashing and yelling to try to break away and for the next few seconds the vehicle had speeded up so fast the rest of us were scrambling to go after, me trying to make it up around the back, my hand tucked in to wrap around my gun before I'd even thought about it. 

And then after a short moment, the car stomped into a full speed and took off, leaving Gaila tripping to the curb. 

I took the moment during everyone's flipping out to mutter our location and the direction the car went in under my breath. Ken picked up something to throw after it, but I grabbed him at the forearm. "Don't, you'll just piss him off." This left him with no outlet but to curse, sharply, before he went up to let Gaila shoot forward into his arms.

Toni was slowing in next to Danek, her face furious. "Did anyone get the number?" Danek was already turning to unzip her shoulder bag and get her PADD out, looking directly at me.

"Nine-'H'-Seven-Four-'D'-Seven. Thornbell model, three or four years old, remember that it's green," I said, not caring if Will didn't know jack about cars and hoping whoever was listening to this would get the message. Danek seemed to have the same idea; I wondered if he'd even copied down the number.

When we turned to where Ken was throwing Gaila half a dozen questions at once, I managed to cut in pretty fast. "Hey," I said, putting my hand lightly on her shoulder. "Could you describe what he looked like if we called the police?"

She looked surprised for half a second, but she gulped down a tremor and stammered, "Um. Yeah. I even noticed a tattoo."

"A tattoo? Where was it?"

"The side of his neck...I could see it pretty clearly, it went down over his collarbone and..."

"What did it look like?"

She blinked, shook her head. "Uh. A _baltin_ , I think it's called. You know, it looks like a jaguar but like with a hare's ears..."

The Saiphon's symbol. I was thinking please, fuck, let there be somebody on the other end of the transmission smart enough to handle this right; I was hoping I'd hear sirens somewhere close by as we started off back to the car with Toni and Danek murmuring an argument over what we should do. Ken had only managed to get Gaila to turn a couple steps though, I realized, because she needed to say something to me.

She muttered stiffly, "I didn't recognize him."

In a faint, startled way, Ken stopped. "...What?"

Gaila was still looking right at me. "I thought it was just some guy."

"Why would you have recognized him?" Ken demanded. When she kept looking like she was waiting for me to understand something, he shook her into looking at him, his voice getting more agitated. "Gaila? Start talking."

Ken was looking at me almost accusingly; I stole a brief glance at Danek over his shoulder and saw his eyes fixed expectantly on Gaila, transfixed and astonished. Gaila spoke to me again.

"We should tell them."

There was a swell of shock as the other three's eyes widened a bit. Danek finally firmly said, "We're going home."

 

 

I realized pretty quickly I should have offered to drive. Danek was swerving way too quickly around corners, tossing everyone's hips in the back seat as he dove through any pass he could make. When he cornered up by a bus at a recklessly close turn, I cleared my throat. "Don't you think you should take it easy?"

"Arrest me," he said acidly, turning hand over hand and making my elbow slap into the armrest.

Will's comm buzzed in my pocket and I flipped it open surreptitiously enough that the back seat wouldn't notice, but I felt Danek giving me a side-eye. I was hoping for something more helpful from Chris, but it was a quick general dispatch message: _Car found unoccupied @ 13th & Perslippe. Number indicates unauthorized vehicle._ Of course.

It was dark once we got to the house. Everyone gravitated to the living room without speaking and sat down around the coffee table, all of us silent and fumbling if not panicking, until Danek spoke.

"I want you to understand that I'm not angry. But the two of you have clearly been keeping something from us."

Gaila had been giving me guilt-ridden looks as if expecting me to be angry, to the point that I felt the need to play it to character and act at least irritated about the whole thing. This hadn't made Ken look very happy with me, but this all ended up working somewhat in my favor, since there was a bit too much pissiness coming my way for people to pry for my side of the story.

"Are you two idiots seriously telling me," Toni asked, "that something like this happened before? Does this have something to do with what happened to Will?"

"How would he know?" Gaila said, "If he can't remember, we had no way of—"

"Please, just," Ken placed his hands out tensely to cut her off. "Explain to us what the hell you're talking about."

She bit her bottom lip, looked over at me. I didn't quite nod, but I tried to give something that looked like encouragement, or permission.

"I'm not sure when it was—two or three days?—before Will was attacked, do you remember when he and I told you we were going to a study group for Civil Wars?" Gaila said this to Danek; there was the tiniest click of almost horrified expectation in his eyes, but he just nodded. "Well, we told you that because he really wanted to go see if he could find that book you wanted at this store they have out there...He'd been trying to talk Toni into going there with him but she doesn't even like to go east of the transport station, and Ken might have gone, but he was busy, so...he convinced me to come." 

For a couple seconds everyone was steeped in that pause at the innocent ignorant beginning of stories like this; Danek was the only one who wasn't looking at me at all.

"And we weren't even in an alley or anything when this happened, it was just this street where there weren't too many people, and this guy..." She sniffed in frustration at herself. "This guy, I don't know if he was from some gang but he seemed like it, he must have been waiting for Will to get distracted by something because the second he was looking in some window, he came right at me...He clapped a hand over my mouth and I swore for a second he was going to stuff me into a car, but then, he just tore me around a corner and slammed me hard up against the wall, and he started saying all this stuff I just couldn't understand..."

"Like what?" Danek pressed when she trailed off, his voice sounding forced into steadiness.

"Something like, he couldn't believe I had the nerve to show my face around there, and he basically said he'd kill me if he could get away with it right then, and that he was going to tell...someone, it's not like I remember the name, that he saw me there. No, he said he didn't kill me because..." She shook her head in tight, angry confusion. "Because he didn't want to take away the _satisfaction_ it would give this other guy. He also said a lot of stuff in Orion, but it was Saiphic Orion, so I couldn't understand."

Toni asked, "But why would they have a problem with you? Something to do with you being Orion but not—?"

"You don't get it, I can't really explain, it was like _I'd_ actually done something, like it was _personal_. He was talking like I was supposed to know who he was talking about and I would swear that he just had me mistaken for someone else, but..." She took in and let out a frantic, frustrated breath. "He called me by my last name. He knew my name."

I was completely befuddled for about one second and then it hit hard, the explanation blindsiding me with a bang: 

Witness protection. We'd never found any data on her name being fake because it wasn't. She'd come out of an entirely different pool of confidential info we hadn't even thought to try to look at. Whoever the real Gaila Vro was, she'd needed to slip out of her name like it was a garment caught on fire and was probably tucked safely into an alias and somewhere on the other side of the planet if not relocated all the way to Terra. Whoever brought her up had apparently been unconcerned about dusting off the ID and slapping it onto someone else. They might as well have marched her down the bloodiest part of the city with a fucking "Kick Me" sign on her back. I wanted to punch a hole in the wall.

While I was sitting there working through this, Gaila was going on about how Will came running around the corner just when the guy gave her a final shove to the pavement.

"Why the fuck wouldn't you tell the cops about this?" Toni demanded.

"No, he did," Gaila innocently protested.

" _He_ —?" Danek blinked, but then realized what she meant before any of the others did.

"Will took me home after that—All I wanted was to go home and forget about it, okay, I couldn't stand the idea of talking to the police, so he said I should just tell him everything and he'd go report it like it happened to him and that we shouldn't..." She paused with a little sigh of guilt. "He said we shouldn't tell any of you, because you'd just worry."

Ken made some cutting little curse. Looking straight at me, he asked, "Did you really report it?" Next to him, Toni tensed. 

"Of course he did, if he said he did," Gaila said.

"Look, we all know you have _issues_ , with the police," Ken said to me. He was furious. 

Toni said, "Ken—"

"Doesn't anybody think that if Will had made a police report about one of us getting threatened that _maybe_ , in the middle of asking us about our friends and Will's friends and Will's classes and Will's sex life and Will's fucking smoking habits, maybe they would have brought that up at some point?"

"Not if they somehow knew that the rest of you wouldn't know anything about it," Gaila weakly offered. "You talk like Will's being a total idiot when we all know the cops in this city don't give a crap about anybody—What about that story about the kid who got pushed down the stairs? We're better off just being careful and fixing things ourselves."

Ken seemed to think about not saying what he was about to say for half a second. "Will's the one who first brought up that story."

Toni seemed the first to get the implication, and her mouth popped slightly open. Ken was still looking straight at me so intently that I couldn't keep my heart from racing a bit. I finally lamely insisted, "Of course I reported it."

I had to say it to keep the wheel turning, but of course I knew it was a lie. I had no clue what Will's plan had been, but obviously he'd felt he had to take the problem into his own hands, clear the air where anyone should have seen it couldn't be cleared without making a hell of a mess. 

My mind, in a flash of anger, remembered how all that was found on the body was a pocket knife, for a second completely stunned that Will would be so stupid as to not even grab his old-fashioned straight razor or the taser that Toni neglects to keep in her purse. There had to be something else I hadn't figured out yet; it didn't get driven home for me until that very moment when I realized that Will may have shown up to confront a criminal armed with something weaker than weapons—I didn't know what, but it hadn't been enough. Maybe there was some calculation to it—thinking they'd only be meeting in public, or that he would be perceived as more honest if he didn't have anything—but it was a far cry from what most people would have done. 

I had no way of knowing what he'd been thinking. All I knew was that Will had done something that was very gutsy and a hell of a lot more stupid, and that he'd done it to protect something the only people he cared about had trusted him with. And I had to admit to myself that in some hypothetical impossible circumstances, I probably would have done the exact same thing.

"I need to talk to Danek alone," I said.

Ken was at lethally grumpy, bitterly mumbling, "Of course."

"Stop it," Danek suddenly snapped at him. Almost immediately, though, the insistence in him got a bit quieter: "Will did what he felt was best for all of us. We're all very angry that he ended up getting hurt, but we need to calm down." 

A nervous guilt overwhelmed the silence for a second, before I remembered to ask, "Gaila, what happened this time? Did he say anything to you?"

"I...don't think so," she stammered, admitting, "I don't know. It all happened so fast, but he definitely didn't say anything before he grabbed me..."

That was when I saw it. My eyes stuttered over Gaila and then down at the table as I went into full-on ready mode, and it was almost impossible for no one else to notice the flinch.

"What?" Gaila asked.

"It's nothing, I..." I said, "I'm getting a migraine."

"Aren't we all," Ken muttered, and he was trying to give me some look of unspoken reconciliation, but I was checking a look at Danek. Even though it made no sense at all, I could have sworn Danek looked like he somehow knew that had been code. His eyes were subtle but intent in my direction, demanding. _What is it?_

Whatever Toni interpreted between the brief glances, it made her take the initiative to clear us the room. "Look, if he wants a minute with Danek, fine." 

She was the first to stand up before the other two followed her into the kitchen. I started rolling the screen remote back and forth between my hands on the carpet, going for anxious and idle. As soon as the others were out of earshot I said, "Gaila's ID card is gone. She always sticks it in her breast pocket when she's wearing that shirt, I saw her do it today. This address isn't connected to your names in any directories, but the cards..."

The change in Danek was almost startling. His breath picked up harshly and he protectively uttered, "The house..."

"Don't look out the windows, don't do anything," I firmly interrupted. "If they're looking in and they see you so much as reach for a comm they might open fire. You can move in front of me if you want."

"Do you think..." Danek was willing himself still, like he wanted to run after the others. "What if they beat us home?"

"With your driving, I doubt it." I looked him over. "Why, what is it?"

He swallowed, finally stammering, "They don't often think to lock the window upstairs."

This was when the lights went out. 

_Fuck_ , I was innerly cursing, but I was grabbing at Danek's sleeve before he did anything sudden. 

"It's gonna be alright. Listen: I have a flashlight under the desk in my room." I pulled his hand over enough to tap it at the underside of the coffee table. "Go get it, then stay with the others, don't worry about the rest of the house."

After only a second, he nodded and we both got up.

I could have told it to him straight but my job was already hung out to dry, and anyway I knew I could depend on him understanding that I wasn't talking about a flashlight. I realized with regret that I could have traded the guns earlier; the one I had was my stun phaser and the one in the room was kill-only. Due to some protests about the risk of losing our authoritative edge, the law never got passed that we can only have stun guns and we get to opt for one or the other. Like almost every officer I prefer stunning and also like almost every cop, I can't pretend to be above occasionally loving to make murderers afraid of me. I wished I had the other gun right then; I didn't like the idea of putting it in Danek's hand, but it was better than nothing. 

Chris had told me at the outset that a tactics team could get to the house in five to seven minutes, which of course was going to feel like forever. If he knew anything about the emergency he'd also be hauling it, but it could take him up to five minutes longer depending on where he was. 

The front door was set to auto-lock, but Danek was smart enough to know that when someone wants to kill you, forced entry really means nothing and they will get in whether they can be discrete about it or not. What we had reason to worry about was the potential for a quiet entrance. 

As soon as I was at the bottom of the stairs I had my gun propped out and took the steps as fast as I could without making more than the slightest noise. I wasn't strictly trained for how potentially messy this situation could get, and it's not like anyone is ever advised to try clearing a house with no back-up and no light, but there was nothing I could do about that. The air was closing in on me, the dark of the steps feeling formidably alien and yet like a place I'd been in once or twice before, and the thought kicked in like an ache now that my chips were down and there was nothing to stop me from thinking it: I wanted Spock.

I was at the door to the loft room trying to remember about nooks and closets and other potential hiding places, when I heard the slam like somebody being shoved, followed by a short furious shriek. And then nothing.

Even if I would have been tempted to storm back down the steps waving my gun around, the darkness made that idea ludicrous; if I was going to be able to do anything I would have to be stealthy. I also trusted with a firm certainty that no one was going to be letting on that there was anyone else in the house unless I did it myself. 

The silence cleared to low, deep murmers as I approached from the bottom of the stairs. I was around the corner peering just into the kitchen threshold, and sure enough there were too many figures around the table. I recognized Danek first out of the dark blotches, and knew that he hadn't even made it my second gun. While I was inching up the stairs they'd all been marched in here to sit around the table, most of them too afraid to make a sound. I didn't think about it that way then, or even of how they'd gotten in: It only seemed like they'd managed to suddenly materialize there in the darkness.

"We've all heard about you, _b'cheni_ ," I heard a thin, coarse voice grating out, that Orion word said mockingly at the end. "Marus thought maybe you skipped town after your little love affair with the guards. I said to myself, no way would she be fucking stupid enough to rat out her man and then go skipping around downtown—"

"You've got something wrong." Ken. "She doesn't know any of you assholes."

"If you talk again, you're gone. Now, I don't know the little _kathti_ but, surely we can all see the resemblance—"

"That isn't..." Gaila's voice, trembling but strong. "That isn't me."

"No?" I heard a slight clap and a sharp nasal breathing: a hand clamped over the bottom of her face, forcing back the arch of her neck. "Looks like she doesn't have the tattoo anymore, but ah, that's okay. You're Gaila Vro, there's nobody else you could be, just look..."

There was a sniff of orange light and I realized someone was holding a lighter up to something; I got a quick glance in and realized he was holding up a photo, and the look on Gaila's face in the small flare told me everything. I knew the feeling, even though in her it was much more of a chaotic little tremble in the room. It was the other Gaila, tangible and impossible and tapping into the air with a low buzz of madness.

Predictably, the man set the flame to the photo and then let it crumble up on the table, and I used the second of light to check in for details: Three men, one standing far off in a corner, the one who had held up the photo and was doing all the gun talk with what looked like a cheap pistol, and another—my heart cringed—holding Gaila's hand forcefully down to the table, his other hand wielding the tallest kitchen knife from Danek's shiny new set.

"How about we stop the fucking game, Vro?" a new voice said. "How about every time you refuse to tell me why you shot your mouth on my brother, I take off one of your fingers?"

I could hear somebody's teeth chattering, a low frantic moan from someone else. I made the call, slipped my phaser back into my holster tucked under my jacket, and then I made a noise. A slip like a misplaced lean in the wall, a sound of someone trying not to be heard.

"—You hear that?"

" _Hey_. Who's fucking around?"

Before somebody had any ideas about shooting in my general direction, I went in playing frantic, hands up and cringing into the outline of the doorway. "Don't shoot," I said raspily. Someone let out a sob.

"Stand over there," the one with the gun demanded, pointing it over at the exact place at the counter where Toni had once sat with Gaila leaning in so she could braid her hair, where the groceries were often set down and then forgotten, where Danek had been the first person I'd wanted to kiss in five months. I went over and stood, dizzily thankful there hadn't been a chair for him to make me take, calculating that I might be able to get clear shots.

At closer range I tried to take better tally of weapons: The guy standing in the corner and the one at the table could have had anything in their jackets, but the one doing most of the talking still looked to be the only one holding anything. They were all male, tall with the exception of the corner guy, but I had to assume they could all be much stronger than me. 

Most of my attention was warily placed on the one who had Gaila. Not knowing what else to do, she had her mouth clamped shut even as she was still being assailed for some unnecessary confession. She was cooler in the eyes than most would be, but that hand being clamped down by the wrist was shuddering. There was that small vibration of her shaking against the table that hummed through the air like an oncoming vessel. 

And just then, the house lights were kind this time.

The furious and terrified familiar faces pitched into vision, along with six ugly menacing eyes. Unfazed, the knife guy wrenched Gaila's face a little farther towards the remaining inches of photo on the table and I was almost too focused on her to see it: the one in the corner taking a step forward and then snapping back, shocked, wide in the eyes like he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Looking right at me. 

The light sometimes made a little fizz sound of energy speeding back up and it was like the entire house was hissing in hatred—I saw the electric line between me and the man and I could swear I sensed Danek and I clenching our fists at the exact same time. Just under my breath I said, with the quiet finality of a sentencing or a command, " _You_."

The one with the knife, looking over and accusing: "Rigen. Isn't that...?"

The gunman saying, "You little _f'shent_. You said that you—"

"No, no, there's no way," he spit out, looking at me but it wasn't spoken to anyone in particular. "I did, man, you were _dead_! I cut your fucking guts out, you were going cold—"

The kitchen table jerked up sharply as I realized, just a half-second away from too late, that I should have been worrying about Danek. He tore up mindlessly across the room and went for Rigen's neck, and the kitchen knife, in so tight a movement it was as if Gaila had been waiting for it to knock and wobble over into her fist, came slamming down onto the hand that had just been holding it. A howl of furious pain, a gun clicked to aim on Danek and then a shout of surprise when the shot hit the third man before anyone could have seen me whipping out my phaser. After I shot the other out of his misery I was running to where Danek and Rigen were kicking and clawing the hell out of each other, spilling into the obscuring living room where the lights were still off. It felt like everyone was too tangled up in the kitchen; it took me too long to get through.

" _Danek_ —" I hollered, " _Stop_!"

Just past the bottom of the stairs I tripped at a gasping body. My hand was lowering to it when I saw the figure ducking out into the yard, fast. 

" _No_ ," I growled out. 

I was slamming out the back door and through the grass to the area farthest from any glow from the streetlights, where I knew he'd run, seeing fuck-all of him and not even stopping to check if any back-up had arrived before branches were flicking across my skin and I was halted at the first swallow into the trees. 

I listened hard, cursing the wind for all the ambient rustling but also knowing without any doubt that he wouldn't run from a good chance to get a jump on me, not from a witness who knew a name, not from someone he thought should have been good as dead already. I walked farther in through the vague path, stepping lightly as if there would be some sink in the ground, some moment where I would know this is where he stepped off to take cover in the thicker expanse. I was about fifty feet in when I chose to make something of a slip of sound off on my left and followed it in, my gun checked forward. 

With no even reason for it, there was a breeze that licked at my collar and made me stop, and turn around. I heard the quick cut of movement behind me just in time to know it was too late.

The hit started between my shoulder blades and a solid strong body was blowing me down; the second my arms were spread something sharp crashed down on my hand and it was a few seconds of white-hot scrambling instinct before I realized I'd lost my phaser. I reacted in the same second with an elbowing cut between his ribs to get him wincing out of the way where he might be able to reach for it. 

And here was the bruising twist of motion as my head went sharp and dead with adrenaline trying to keep that other body too close to make a dangerous move, trying to get him square in the eye or the neck with my muscles screaming against the stronger grip. He grazed a punch along my gut that had me worked down for a long second and there was the cold switch of a blade meeting the air, Will's death shivering around me in the manic motions of the trees and my identical heart hollering behind my ribs as if it was punching forward for vengeance, and I don't know what that kid must have thought of in his last moments before the crack—that music in Gaila's hair when it catches and bounces off of everything it touches, a final masterpiece of Toni's little puppets singing across the paper sets, some ghostly consolation of Ken's constant fearlessness, all of it moving in a sad little triumph to Danek's fingers on the keys playing a last lullaby. I have a pretty good idea whose voice I would have heard like he was right there with me, the lunatic apparition of my ticket waiting to be punched, but I didn't make it that far. My hand found metal.

My arm split up to slam the handle into an ear, my legs grasping to toss myself around and I wrenched down for the pressure points until I had his arms tied under my grip, and snapped up to point the phaser at the back of his head.

Somewhere in the middle of the struggle there had been sirens from up the street and they were louder and coloring into my coherence, and the mess under my knee was moaning some kind of Orion hail-mary until it turned into "Don't shoot me, please—listen, the _police_..." I ticked the gun down in a hard tap so he went still.

My breath was heaving in and out of my teeth, my hold shaky but firm as I finally got the air to grunt, "I am the police."


	9. Chapter 9

I called out when I finally saw the beam of light licking across the trees. Someone who didn't look to be tactics came running, trying not to blind me with the flashlight once he caught sight of me.

As soon as my eyes adjusted I recognized that it was Rock. I stood up, nodding down and finally letting off my phaser hold when he had his cuffs out and clapped them around Rigen's wrists.

"Congratulations," Rock procedurally declared, "you're under arrest for the murder of William Kenley that occurred on the night of 2261.7, or ND's November the fourth—"

"Don't you mean attempted murder?" Rigen muttered as he was hauled off of the ground.

Rock laughed a little wickedly. "Oh, you are gonna be _so_ much fun...Hey. You alright?"

I'd started back towards the house when he yelled that after me; instead of answering I tiredly asked, "Is Pike here?"

"Can't help you with that. Janice and I were right in the area, he would've come on his own."

I gave him a lazy signal of thanks and dragged myself farther away. Once I was in the yard I went around to the front—I didn't feel right going through the house again—and the first figure who turned at the sight of me and came walking up was Toni, her body all slack and numb-looking.

I realized there was an ambulance, that that had been the reason for the sirens. Toni's mouth opened but seemed to fail at getting anything out as she looked me up and down. She came up and reached her arms out to me, but I took her by the shoulders and kept her at that distance, examining the deep blotch that started in a nebula low on her pastel blouse, noticed the slick of blood running up one of her arms. The blood was green.

That was when I saw the small tangle of Ken and Gaila trying to get past a couple medics, and the stretcher, and I was walking towards it without even thinking. One of the tactics people must have recognized me and assumed I knew what I was doing, but I didn't really know. One second I was scrambling to make the long way around to the back door of the ambulance and then the stretcher was moving by, a heaving bloodied body and Danek's hand grabbing at my shirt, hard. I looked into a pair of dark, desperate eyes gasping for air and begging me for something, and I meant to say "We got him," but I ended up just nodding. His hand loosened away and they lifted the stretcher up and slammed the doors on him, and the ambulance revved off.

"Will!" Ken was yelling at me as they were ushering the other residents away, taking them in for the questioning parade. I saw Janice mutter something to him that made his pale face finally look away, momentarily appeased as they got into the car and were driven off. Only when the traffic started to clear and I was stood alone on the driveway did I hear Chris yelling something that sounded like my name.

It occurred to me belatedly that I must have looked like shit. I could feel the blue-black pain of a monster bruise forming around my ribs, and places on my face felt like they'd been scratched clean open.

Chris had just gotten there. He was stopping in front of me and grabbing at my shoulders in an urgent shake and saying, "Oh, fuck. Are you alright?"

For a second I kind of forgot to answer the question. My brain was beat half to death, a week's worth of my snap-instinct all used up in one go, and it wasn't until I looked straight into Chris and saw something in his eyes that shocked me a little, sobered me, that I patted back at one of his arms. "I'm okay."

 

 

I was down to Will's last Slatroy, alone in the third interview room at the homicide headquarters.

I'd always thought they could have made these rooms a bit more eerie but most people find them chilly enough, with the cold echo of every tiny motion you make and the ghosts on the other side of the black glass. Even though they were basically identical, I would've been able to tell you this was the third one down the hall if you'd marched me into the offices with a bag over my head.

Spock and I got our first confession in this room. That beginning was eventually book-ended, naturally, with Sarah March. I could still see her sitting across from me in that one second her usual act was set down just long enough to give me a glinting look over a little smile, letting me know she knew she'd won. I could feel all over again that sink and sickly spin I'd felt in my stomach even as I was calling her a liar and getting out of the room.

I didn't want to remember her. I let myself think about Spock instead.

There was something I hadn't thought of in a while: We'd had this tap rhythm, seven notes I'd randomly pulled out of a movement of Mozart I had stuck in my head, that we used once as code for when I wanted to be able to signal to Spock whether I thought a suspect was lying without it being obvious we were communicating. I'd make like I was boredly tapping my stylus or a thumb against the table, or lightly kick a leg of his chair. We used the code again and again, but the meaning was always different, and over time there were ways we used it without really establishing beforehand what it meant. We would just catch the other's eye and somehow know. After a point it wasn't just for the info digging: It meant _I'll take care of this_ , it meant _I'm right here_. It meant _She totally wants to sleep with you and I'm too much of a gentleman to mention it out loud_.

I felt along the edge of the tabletop and there was the first of the chipped notches in the wood. I'd started going at the table with my pocket knife once like a bored kid in the back of a classroom, one of a few tricks I'd use to make a suspect forget we were being filmed. After a point I'd started adding a notch every time Spock and I got a confession. The afternoon after the Marches' bodies were found, I could remember having to lug our work into these rooms because of the maintenance being done in the regular offices, and automatically picking this one, my hand fingering to count the marks as I sat down.

_"Is he thinking about putting us with a third?" I asked, swooping a chair out and straddling it backwards close to the table._

_"He said he had not decided yet. It should depend on what the next two or more days of the investigation yields."_

_Spock was going through the stack we'd just brought in in some half-hearted attempts at preliminary organization, until he stopped, saying my name._

_I looked up over after a few seconds. "Hmm?"_

_"How long have you known?"_

_I looked up, doing coy for a couple seconds until I made myself get serious. "You mean that you're Amanda Grayson's kid?"_

_"For all the time I've known you, you only mentioned it today, when you pulled me aside to talk to me about the pendant."_

_"You don't think I've wanted to ask you about it a million times? You just never brought it up, and I figured you would have if you wanted to talk about it, so I made myself keep my mouth shut."_

_Something heavy and distant came into his expression, and he spoke carefully. "I couldn't claim to have ever told that many people, but there was a point when I made a rule of no longer doing so...Many who come across that information find it apparently difficult to restrain themselves from asking me if I am 'sure' that I don't remember anything that happened. The reason I left Vulcan at such a young age was to seek out a place where few people would even connect my name to the incident. You may appreciate the irony that I found myself returning to the area of the disappearance after that, but my mother's name is what people prominently remember, and if they remember mine they likely dismiss it as a common one."_

_I looked right at him, suddenly a bit pained. "I'm sorry. God, I've wanted to say it for years. I'm so sorry."_

_Spock straightened himself a bit. "It has been twenty years since it happened."_

_"I found out, I don't know, a couple months after we partnered up. Somebody mentioned that case when we were hanging out at Billy's, and I guess there's only one cop in a blue moon who's cynical enough to actually look up the file just because he can, and I was one who did. For a while I thought it couldn't be possible, that there had to be dozens of Spocks from Vulcan, but...you mentioned to me some time after that that your mother was human. And I guess it explained a couple things about you, why you've never talked much about your family...."_

_"I was wondering whether you'd known even before we were acquainted."_

_"What, and that I'd had some grim fascination with you?"_

_"I hardly would suspect it now," he granted, "but I am grateful you were wise enough not to mention it close to the start of our partnership."_

_"So you would've thought it then?" I gave him a look that went somewhere between a disbelieving squint and a teasing smirk. "You mean to tell me you don't know what made me want to be partners with you and you've never actually asked?"_

_Spock said, "It was apparent that we would be well matched; I fail to see how it would be a mystery why you would want to work with me."_

_I gave him a look that said I knew he'd just backpedaled, but I let it go. "Are you going to be alright on this case?"_

_"Obviously it should be of some official concern that I'm of a personal relation to a potentially related case, but it isn't strictly prohibited, assuming a supervisor approves it. I have already spoken with Walsh and he is confident that I will be able to handle the investigation."_

_"Yeah, except it wouldn't occur to Junior that it could ever be a problem. He thinks you're a walking computer."_

_Spock was blinking down at the table, as if pretending to be a little distracted. "...You believe I'm emotionally compromised by the subject of the case?"_

_"Spock." I said it solidly, waiting patiently for him to look straight at me. "I'm not worried, if you're not worried."_

The opening of the door yanked me up by an inch, made me mutter, "Fucking finally" before I fingered forward the ashtray and put out my cig. The woman from records introduced herself as Mary Sanchez, and she wasn't going to like me by the end of an hour. I generally hate giving verbal reports, and I was antsy as hell to know what the hell was going on, especially since no one had any way of directly contacting me. Will's comm had wriggled out of my pocket at some point, probably during the wrestle, and my own comm was still collecting dust at the bottom of Pike's desk.

"Do you know why we're doing this here?" I asked. I sounded a little whiny but I couldn't really help it.

"I thought it was a little weird, but it's as good as anywhere, isn't it? They didn't want you at senior headquarters...They made it sound like that's what you'd want. Pike was convinced you'd be comfortable not being at risk of running into any of the other victims."

"Well, you can scrap that idea." This was the exasperated comment from Janice Rand, who had just opened the door to peep her head in, apparently looking for me.

"What are you doing back here?" I asked.

"I'm here to give you a ride," she said in a sympathetic sigh, "over to senior. To talk to the residents."

I figured I knew where this was headed. Shaking my head, I said, "Wait, is Chris over there with them? They're not actually...Jesus Christ, they _cannot_ be telling them about Will—?"

"Apparently they weren't going to try, but—" Janice was interrupted by an alert from her comm; it was on the dispatch setting and she set it up on open speaker on the table. I was hoping for Chris, but it was some grumpier member of records personnel.

"Is he there?"

Sanchez interrupted, "What's going on? I still need to get a statement from—"

"I'm sorry, but we can't get the residents to calm down. They're really anxious about Will and are refusing to talk about anything until he's with them. They were very confused, they were convinced he was in trouble for having an illegal firearm or something, and they were being so stubborn about wanting to know where he was it was getting very hard to work with..."

My hands went up covering my face for a couple seconds.

"So Detective Pike was attempting to...explain some things to them, and they are apparently refusing to be persuaded."

"Their friend is in the hospital, for fuck sakes," I growled. "The statement can't wait?"

"It's extremely unwise to wait. The more time victims have to talk to each other, the more the details can be unreliable..."

"It's _on recording_. Put Pike on."

"I wouldn't know anything about the level of surveillance, but I know there was no visual. I could put Pike on, but this is outside of his jurisdiction—"

"Okay, look. If what you need is someone who can convincingly attest to being a genetic source, couldn't you try to get a hold of somebody else who could be even more convincing?"

Janice looked at me, considering. "Spock?"

The records fuckwit drawled, "Pike already asked me to contact Detective Spock. He said he'd like to be of assistance, but he's taking care of something over at Dalaigh Park."

Still looking my way, Janice crossed her arms, and with a careful boldness said, "Try Spock again. Tell him this time Kirk's the one asking."

For about a second there was a vindictive part of me that thought that was just a swell idea, but I pulled myself out of it, sighing. "Nevermind...If he says he's busy, it's probably a hell of a night."

And with that I was already throwing my jacket back on, leaving Sanchez groaning in annoyance. Just as I got up I traced my finger along the table edge one last time, counting the braille of the notches that used to feel like _yes, yes, yes_.

 

 

Of course part of me had felt like it would come to this and that it was cowardly of me to even try to wriggle out of it. I was in a bad state on the drive over to headquarters. I'd gotten the worst of my wounds taken care of before getting sent over to Murder, but I still had a tight pain in my bones. I kept getting excessively peeved at improper drivers because Rand didn't have anything she could say to make me feel like this could go well and I didn't want her to worry about trying.

"Hell of a night," she muttered in belated agreement once we hit a block of traffic that was leaving a stadium event. "So. Rock said he heard this guy squealed right to your face."

"Yeah. I guess he was in trouble when they thought he hadn't gotten the job done, so..." I shrugged. "Getting a real confession will be another thing."

"Joey can work him. Oh God, he's going to be pissed, though, that all this research we were doing wasn't for anything. Did you know I was working all the way back to checking up on your first year arrests?"

"It's not down the drain. It'll go on your record."

For the next couple minutes I would've told Janice to hell with it, just use the flashing lights, but I couldn't make myself feel in a rush. When we finally pulled back into smoother traffic, Janice spoke again.

"I couldn't believe it," she said, "when Joey told me you and Spock aren't speaking anymore."

It isn't easy for somebody like Janice to set me on edge. I couldn't tell if the way I was reacting to the subject had mellowed down a bit and it was something I could at least acknowledge at a distance, or if I just didn't have any room for getting revved up on that particular night.

"The crazy thing is, I figured he was the reason you left the squad," she added after a moment. "...But I didn't think it was over something bad."

"...What?" It was like I'd lost an epic staring contest or some other childishly stubborn gamble: Janice, of all people, had gotten me to speak up, because I had no idea what she'd meant. When I looked over I thought she was blushing, like she suddenly regretted bringing it up.

"Forget it, it's just...I always kind of looked up to you. Which is a little embarrassing if you think about it, but I did. And I guess I just assumed it would have to be for something you really wanted, for you to leave. Which makes it sound like I'm disappointed or..." She scoffed weakly at herself. "I'm just trying to say, it must have been bad, and I'm sorry."

Before I could start wondering what the hell to say to that, we were pulling up to the lot.

On the way through the entrance and the security and the lifts, I couldn't think of what I was going to say to them. It was almost like a part of me knew that what I was about to tell them wasn't something for words. I couldn't imagine what I was going to do. Giving them the strong-armed compassion and encouraging them to drink some water would have felt terribly impersonal, but I had no place to treat them as anything else.

Even with all that, it wasn't much of a blessing that I didn't end up having to say anything at all. Gaila took me off guard by being in the hallway rather than affixed in the predictable location of one of the witness rooms, her hand at the handle of a door I presumed Toni and Ken were waiting on the other side of. I don't know what she was doing. They must have been told that this person named Kirk was coming to talk to them.

The second she saw me, I knew it wasn't going to be that simple.

"Oh, Will." Running up to me with her eyes wide and pleading and relieved all at once, clutching a hand at my forearm. "What the hell is going _on_ —These people aren't making any sense...They've been telling us this crazy stuff, and we...Will?..."

It wasn't anything I did or said: Gaila's eyes looked straight up into mine, and then something in her came to a full stop.

I don't know what it was she saw. I only heard Danek's words coming back to me, ringing cold and bitter against the bricks and the metal doors and the yellowy light catching little fires in Gaila's curls. _Now that I know, it's so obvious_. Gaila's face, with a terribly slow dawning to it, shut down into one of dismayed horror. I could almost see the moment when it led into the stab of irrational, inevitable guilt, that sickening feeling like she'd failed a test of some kind, that she could have scrapped everything into reverse and that none of this would have ever happened if she had only somehow known. Her hand curled back from my arm in a motion of revulsion and then up to cover her mouth. Her entire body snapped and sank into desolation, as if I wasn't even standing there, when the first sobs came.

One of the interns got her gently by the shoulders before I'd even realized anyone else was there, and through the muddled feeling of paralysis somebody was gently taking me by the arm and then by a shoulder and leading me away.

Chris had called Bones to make sure I had a ride back. He was saying, "You're alright, kid," and nudging me back into the lift when I didn't seem to realize that was where I was supposed to go.

 

 

It was a long time before I was free to go home, but Bones waited me out. For half of the ride to my place I didn't say a word, but when the silence depressed me too much I started asking him about what he'd been up to, which I really was curious enough about. He told me there had been several cases of an unusual virus that had kept him pretty busy until he was able to hone down a way to detect it as a cause of death. By the time we were in my neighborhood I realized I was so exhausted I was hardly hanging onto anything he was saying, but being mostly tired felt like an improvement.

"Hey. Comm your ma," Bones nagged at me as I was getting let off. "But don't do it when you look like hell."

"Yeah, yeah." As I was sliding out of the passenger seat I said, "Thanks, Bones."

"Goodnight."

It was late, but not too late for Molly to be up. She was my next-door neighbor, a likable mother of three boys whose names I couldn't seem to keep straight. My apartment complex is one of several in ND that was once a hotel resort, so we enjoy the unusual view of a swimming pool a couple floors down outside our doors. She was leaning on the balcony and having a cigarette when I came by.

"Hey, Jim."

"Molly. Got an extra?"

She let me knuckle out a smoke and I patted at my pockets, realizing I still had my lighter at least. After a first drag I realized I was holding it by my pinky and moved it back, telling my hands to stay steady.

"How was your vacation?" Molly asked.

I let out a long sigh of smoke, and I settled on saying, "I almost never came back."

 

 

I was thrown onto the R & R and talk therapy belt by default, and besides my first counseling session with Doctor M'Benga, I had nothing to do for the first few days after the operation besides dust my apartment and sink into my couch, weighed down by the nagging hollowness of being back home. I was jetlagged back into my own life, waking up at Will o'clock sharp for the classes I wouldn't be going to. The last time I'd left undercover, I'd slept like a baby for a couple days, partied for two more, and then got to work applying for homicide with a sudden excited instinct about it. My only reason for worrying much about when I'd be returning to Domestic Violence was wanting to see my rookie through to the end of his preliminaries.

Chris finally found the time to come by on the third day of my little vacation. He'd kept me up to date on the important particulars: I knew that Joey and Rock had worked a confession out of Rigen, and that Danek was recovering well and had cooperatively spoken with Pike the same day he was on his feet. I did not know yet whether Chris knew that I had lied to him.

"Well, some interesting stuff came out of Rigen," Chris said as he took his favored seat on the easy chair. "It looks like he himself had no idea why the higher-ups wanted this guy out of the picture...He was just some newbie chump trying to impress somebody and took out Will because he'd seen a picture of him. After getting nothing out of him we pressed on the gents you stunned, and the one with the hand did say that he heard some of the gang talking about somebody who was trying to offer bribes to get the heat off of somebody who'd ratted out a few of their weapons smugglers...I think it goes without saying that Will's tenacity was what got him in trouble there. If they're so hot on something that they're not interested in money, you better haul your ass and never call back. I can't imagine why he felt the need to keep messing with it. He had no reason to think these guys knew where she lived."

"Somebody must have struck up a deal, for him to go back again," I said after a moment. I'd had more time than Chris had to think about this. "Maybe it was Rigen. I'd bet he's lying about not knowing the whole deal about Will. He saw that the boss wasn't one for negotiating but thought he might be able to skim off of Will under the table, so he gave him the time and place. Maybe he was planning on offing him all along just for the status points, maybe it was Will figuring out what was going on and being too much trouble. And if Rigen didn't mention this, maybe he had a sidekick he's trying to protect. Somebody who would be in possession of a suspicious amount of money they can't account for."

The moment where I could have pretended not to know everything about Will had passed, and Chris didn't look surprised. I only wondered now if it was Danek who'd told him or if he'd figured it out on his own. The first thing Chris finally asked was, "Where do you think he got a huge enough amount of money to bribe somebody?"

"Stole it," I said, shrugging. "If you're good at hacking...I know the basics of how somebody could do it."

Chris scoffed. "Jesus, Jim, I don't even know what to do with any of it."

My glance was fixed somewhere forward, sobering before I said, "I'm sorry. About how things went at the end."

"Ah, fuck it. It was your hunch against mine and yours was dead right."

"Still." I couldn't help asking, "Did Danek tell you?"

"No. At least not until he knew that I suspected what had been going on. Speaking of..." He reached into his coat pocket. "I've got something he gave me."

At first I was confused, but then I realized what it would be before he handed over the small data storage chip. Danek had made me a copy. It took me a second to form words. "Did you watch this?"

"It is not within my division, it's IS evidence. As for that copy, no cigar either, because he expressly gave it to me to give to you and only you."

I looked up at him and then back at the chip, dazed. When I met eyes with Chris yet again there was something that was almost a smirk there, and I shook my head.

"He hates me," I said, surprised by the gravel of emotion I heard in my voice as it came out.

"I really don't think it's that simple," Chris said carefully.

"I really don't think that we're being honest with ourselves. If we try to pretend this is something we did for them," I replied coolly, but the bitterness rose up the more I spoke. "I did this _to_ them. And on top of that, the entire thing was a fucking waste."

Chris patiently demanded, "How?"

"We've got absolutely nothing on finding who made them, and we would have known that much earlier. And the moment they knew Will was dead, it would have been just a matter of time before Danek watched the chip, and then...maybe he would have kept it to himself, but anyway, if Gaila knew Will was dead she would have probably said something about the threats."

"Okay, even _if_. If Gaila had said anything to us from the start about these guys, she's still saying to us now she's never seen Rigen before in her life. He wasn't involved in the threats, so the chances of us having been able to pull him in without you having been where you were at the time that you were?...Pretty damn low, Jim. And the thing about Danek is...he wouldn't trust us at all if it weren't for you."

I gave a dubious wince. "How do you figure that?"

"Because Will didn't trust the police, and he just recently found out that Will knows more about a lot of things than he does. We could have gotten _nothing_ out of them regardless of how scared they were, Danek could have gone on pretending the chip didn't even exist as far as the law's concerned. And you might as well know: He refused to cooperate with any of my questioning until I reassured him that nothing he told me was going to compromise your job."

I didn't know what to do with that. It didn't exactly change my mind about things, but I felt a bit like the breath had gone out of me just the same. "I guess I have him to thank then, huh?"

"Well, on that subject...I trashed the part of the audio file where you got your attitude on, so no boy scout in the records team is going to get you in any trouble."

I looked up, one corner of my mouth twitching up helplessly. "Oh."

He let out a long sigh, something in his expression kind of playfully still pissed at me before he said, "I wanted Jim Kirk back. And that is what I got."

He was up and getting back into his jacket, when he paused. Something in me wanted to brace for it, but when he spoke his voice was almost gentler than I'd ever heard it before, and that took me off guard more than anything.

"Look. You're a hell of a cop. I don't know what it was that made you forget that." He shook his head. "But you shouldn't let it matter anymore. I'm not going to pretend I know what it is you need to do, son, but I want you to know I never would have lifted a finger to try to pull this operation if I had any reason to think you were perfectly happy where you are now."

I felt like too much was itching through me and it took a good effort to even look back at Chris for a second. I finally managed to give a short nod of understanding.

"And for fuck sakes, give me a comm every once in a while," he pointed back at me on his way to my door. "I'm not letting you get under my radar this time."

This time I got out a smile. "Yes, sir." Chris was already halfway to the door, and I sank onto my back on the couch, listening to his footsteps dissolve after the latching. I lay there doing nothing but thinking until I fell asleep.

In my dreams I was Will pretending to be Jim, or I was walking from his bedroom into my bathroom and there were movements of myself in the mirror when I wasn't twitching a muscle. He was always at the edges, but I was never quite fully into his skin or my own. There was always something poisoning one life with the other.


	10. Chapter 10

After a few weeks I went back to the Patio just at closing time hoping to catch Joan the waitress so that I could apologize for the fraudulent flirting. She remembered me right off the bat and didn't seem particularly wounded, or at least was caught up in the entertainment value of a person claiming to be an undercover cop and then, once I'd shown her my badge, of realizing I really wasn't bullshitting. It took her a couple minutes, but the point when she really believed me was when she realized, "Something's kinda different about you this time...You're giving me the creeps, copper."

I walked her to where she had her bike chained up at the end of the block, and then I said I really would give it a go if she wanted to go out some time. She looked like she really almost said yes, but then she didn't. It wasn't so awkward; she passed up the moment with some joke about preserving a pleasant rapport with frequent customers, which I said was fair, and we laughed.

"Tell you what. You come in during my shift tomorrow and I'll bum you a free slice of pie."

"I can't tomorrow. I have to go in and testify against somebody."

In the middle of undoing her bike lock, she cocked an eyebrow. "Is it somebody bad?"

"Very bad."

The next day at the courthouse set me on edge more than I was used to. I'm usually pretty good with testimony; I have to worry about not looking bored more than anything else most of the time, but at Rigen's trial everything was different. I walked up to the stand and kept my eyes blankly fixed only several feet forward, but I felt this buzzing stick of eyes looking at me far more closely than I liked. The prosecution lawyer started off the whole circus with a showy "You may or may not have noticed that there is some resemblance between Detective Kirk and the victim..." Immediately this stirred up some of the crowd into cowlicks of noise and motion and made the judge go banging the mallet in record time.

While I was being questioned, a figure sitting in the audience flickered into the corner of my eye: a cap of dark hair and a red scarf somewhere up in one of the balcony boxes. I wasn't able to do a double take. By the time I was done and had the chance to look again, Danek—assuming I hadn't only imagined it was him—had already quietly slipped out.

 

 

Transferring to Domestic Violence hadn't put an end to my weekly visit to my favorite library that happened to be in the same vicinity of a lot of police buildings. The actual traditional stacks weren't very dense, but the first floor had a wide open feel, complete with a greenhouse that spanned along two floors and an echoey courtyard where people could rollerblade with their pets.

I was there on a less than busy day with a tall cup of coffee when I unexpectedly got a comm from Uhura. It had been a couple weeks since the cat had been let out of the bag to all of the sources. I'd heard Hikaru Sulu was very difficult to get a hold of, and when he'd heard about the whole crime ("person laundering" was the phrase IS had prissily come up with) he had mostly been fascinated by it but overall too busy to be more than a little interested in the details. I got the impression he was the type to be strangely enthusiastic about his indirect involvement with something so anomalous; Uhura was comming me with the other kind of reaction.

"They're saying that apparently the apartment I was living in while I was doing undercover hasn't been lived in since I left, so that was probably where they found a genetic sample?" She let out a vague grumble; it sounded like she was sitting in traffic somewhere. "It blows my mind. And they don't even know what they would have been used for, but it couldn't have been anything good...It just makes me _sick_ , like I had something to do with it somehow."

There was a tapering in the tone at the end, like she wanted to laugh at herself but needed some form of reassurance that she wasn't being unreasonable. It felt really good to hear that from someone else. "Yeah, I know. I know what you mean."

"You're probably expecting me to ask you what she was like...I almost don't want to know. They were asking if it would be okay with me to give her my information, if she ever wanted to contact me, and I said it was fine. But there's just something about this whole thing that scares me half to death. It took them forever to even talk me into believing it."

One time while Uhura and I were working together, I was there to see one of our bosses say to her face that he was starting to think there was something fishy about her. Without flinching she'd told him in her in-character hints of Dominican accent and unflappable good humor that she'd strip down to prove she wasn't tapping him but that she thought that was no way to treat a lady, until the drunk boss was laughing at himself over the whole thing and ended up paying her round. It isn't easy to give Uhura a scare. If it was the more precise, quiet cruelties that gave her the chills, I hadn't realized we had that in common.

"Do you think you'd ever want to meet her?" I asked, hoping she wasn't going to get into asking me anything about Will.

"I don't know. It seems crazy not to, in a way, especially since I may be moving there anyhow."

"Woah, woah. Say again?"

"Yeah," she said, laughing shyly. "I'm thinking about transferring to the NDPD."

"Oh, no. No, don't do that." I was only half kidding.

"It's not the nicest place, I know, it's just that...I'm getting really _bored_ here."

I let out a long sigh.

"Anyway, if I'm there soon, we should go get another beer together, right?"

My attention was caught by my realization that a young woman who was at the end of the aisle seemed to be patiently waiting for me to hang up, as if she had something to ask me; this stacked right into recognizing who she was.

"Jimmy," Uhura mildly snapped. "Still there?"

"Uh...hey, I gotta call you back."

I hung up and walked down to the end of the aisle. Lora March turned her glance up at me, tucked her hair behind her ear and gave me a tired but friendly expression. "Detective. It's been a while."

"Lora, hi." After a half-stunned hesitation, I clutched her hand into a shake.

"I hope you don't mind...I didn't have your number or anything and I went over to the office, but they said you'd transferred. This lady named Janice told me you might be here."

I was still taking her in. She would have been nineteen by now and I couldn't really gauge if she looked older in any way. But she looked better. She had a hell of a pair of eyes peering out between a head of black hair that firecrackered out in dark waves; I'd never noticed before that she was pretty, but that comes with the job. We tend to meet people when they're feeling and looking their worst. Now, Lora was wearing heavily frayed jeans and a top in a very complicated print, the kind of lively multi-cultural thrift store get-up that reminded me of what Gaila would wear, and she had a leash thrown around her neck that must have belonged to a dog she'd dropped off somewhere. It was good to see her out and living.

"Is anything wrong?" I asked.

"Oh no, um. It's this..." She was reaching into the back pocket of her jeans. "They're finally releasing some of the stuff that was being kept in evidence, so they commed me to ask if I wanted any of what was on the bodies. And this, I know it was Madri's, but...I figured your partner would want to have it."

The charm necklace had a small but heavy silver medallion that had been engraved with Vulcan symbols like numbers on a clock face. Holding it in my hand again, I pictured Madri and Colin March lying in the twigs next to each other, hands almost touching. I'd barely noticed the pendant sitting against the pulseless neck until I'd become increasingly aware of something like a shudder just next to me and saw Spock looking straight at it like he couldn't see anything else. This one thing. This harmless little object that Madri had picked up because she thought it was just something pretty, had cost us big time.

Lora still gave me the slightest bit of heebee-jeebies when I looked at her, because of how much she looked like Sarah. Take the way so many friends of the family had shorthanded the two as "the girls" and how eerily alike they looked, and it was initially assumed that they were sisters rather than cousins.

When I was a kid I had a game that took you to this logic puzzle with two identically blinking faces of little girls: _One of us always tells the truth and one of us always lies._ I think of that whenever I bring up the image of Lora and Sarah March in their sitting room and the entire badly handled ordeal of the necklace. Lora had said she'd seen it on Madri a couple times. Sarah, mildly putting through her natural emotional frustrations, protested that all jewelry looked pretty much the same to Lora and that Madri's own daughter would have a better idea. She insisted that she'd never seen the necklace before.

Of course we'd both believed Sarah from the start. I'd like to say it was because anyone might assume the two cases had to be connected, and we had our own vendettas against buried enigmas that made us want it to be, but we still _could_ have taken Lora more seriously. It wasn't that we sympathized less with her, but there was something about Sarah which I've realized by now was carefully constructed to twist us her way. Putting aside the daughter-versus-niece complication, a lot of detectives might have seen Sarah barely moving on the couch, and Lora reduced to animated sobs while the cigarette I'd given her hung forgotten from her fingers, and been more inclined to unconsciously side with the latter. Sarah, though, it was like she sized us up somehow and then put on her more contained version of grief.

Spock had told them why we were asking about the pendant in the first place, only vaguely explaining some things about the necklace "matching the description" of one that was worn by a woman who disappeared many years previously and that we were handling the possibility of a rather procrastinating serial killer leaving us a calling card. We're hardly in the habit of treating surviving family members as suspects when the bodies show up outside of the home and definitely not when they're so young, so it wasn't something I thought twice about, but I remember that for whatever reason I caught Spock's glance across the corner of their tea table as I leaned over and tapped the ashes off of my cigarette in the rhythm of our code: _Be careful._

Even with that hunch, it went further than I could have seen, much earlier than I could have seen. I hadn't known that when young and fragile Sarah March arrived on the case, clutching to her own composure and looking like one slightest additional disaster could wrench her out of that brave calm, it was over. Spock had seen himself in her.

"So you can get it to him?" Lora was asking.

I finally half-stupidly stammered, "Thanks," before tucking the pendant into my jacket pocket.

Lora kept giving me a look like there was something she wanted to ask but she wasn't sure if she should.

"You understand he shouldn't have been on that case, right?" I asked.

She let out a sigh.

"We both made that mistake, and I'm so sorry. I know I said it before, but..." I shrugged.

"I have to wonder how else you would have ever figured out it was Sarah. It took you bringing up that other case to catch her in a lie in the first place."

"We still made a pretty big mess of it, though."

She winced and shrugged at what she was about to say. "You know, the craziest part of it is that I'm not even sure why she did it. I guess it was about the money, and not wanting them to try to tell her what to do with her life. I always got this idea that everyone else in the house were just these annoying...creatures to her, that just got in her way. You can have a pretty simple idea of how to be free when you don't care about anybody else, I guess."

"...Did you always know?" I asked. "That she was like that?"

"Oh. Oh, yeah." She nodded. "It's hard to imagine Madri and Colin never thought there was anything strange, but it's hard to make yourself look at your own kid like that."

"How did you know?"

"It was the lying," she said certainly, with a shrug. "Lying about things, where I couldn't really understand why anyone would lie about them, except to sort of control me. Just complicated, weird little lies. I'm sure you did enough research to know I've got a nice little string of delinquency on my record. Suspensions from school and everything, and I know I did a lot of things I shouldn't have done, but...She had me backed into the scapegoat corner so fast, practically the minute I moved in."

Lora adjusted her bag on her shoulder as someone went by, and then she didn't look at me as she kept talking.

"It didn't take me too long to just accept it. I made the mistake of thinking it made much of a difference to her whether I tried to call her out or not. I think I kinda thought...if I could love Sarah. If it was like we were sisters and I pretended everything was okay, that Madri and Colin would love me like I was their daughter. I was thirteen...I was really insecure, I was angry, I didn't know any better."

"None of it's your fault," I said very slowly. "You know that, right?"

"Yeah, I know," she said, in a way that seemed too easy. "Even all that time, it's not like I thought she'd ever do anything like that. At least, it wasn't something I could really let cross my mind. And the worst part is...when it came to trying to love her, sometimes it wasn't so hard...I knew her better than anyone else did, anyway."

I had my back rested against the shelf behind me, and we stood there slouching until the coldness finally abated a bit.

"Are you really not a murder detective now?" she asked.

"It's behind me, yeah," I said, furrowing my brows. When she gave me a thoughtful look, I scoffed. "Why, do you think I should be?"

She pouted. "Yeah. I mean, I guess so. Anyway. Take care of yourself."

It wasn't until she hesitantly shook my hand again, with a bit more of a squeeze to it this time, that I really thought about the fact that she'd sought me out instead of looking for Spock at the office or passing the necklace to him through somebody else. It made me wonder, even with how fucked up things had gotten, if it was possible she remembered me as a source of comfort more than as anything else. I know I have a weak spot for Lora that is based as much on compassion as a twisting guilt that I get even now when I think about her. I think it's the fact that if I'd really been looking harder for it, I could have felt for her in much the way Spock empathized with Sarah.

It was a snowy morning when I got a hold of an acquaintance of the Marches who offhandedly told me that Madri had bought the necklace when they were out shopping together at a craft market just a week before she and Colin had gone missing. She was able to describe the charm pretty well before I even showed her the image, and I was forced to conclude that the damn thing had just been thrown back up by the New Dublin tide, probably found years ago by some hikers who pawned it somewhere.

I sat in the car for a long time just wondering how in the hell I was going to tell this to Spock. And when I was still lost about dealing with that idea, I realized with a new cold objectivity that a couple inconsistencies in the answers we'd gotten from Sarah were possibly no longer so harmless. Sarah had been too insistent, I realized. She was a liar.

I spent the rest of that day feeling guilty for being grateful that Spock wasn't picking up his comm, and then much later I drove to the Marches. I dialed up Lora's personal number and told her I needed her to come talk to me in private. It was just before bed and she came out in a nightshirt under her sweater and sat in the passenger seat, hugging her arms over her chest. Within a minute I was asking her if she could think of any reason why her cousin would want to have her parents killed, and she immediately burst into tears.

Of all the bad news I've delivered to families, the times that get under your skin almost more than the reactions to deaths of loved ones is when you have to tell somebody that their brother or sister or child is somebody we think could be a murderer. Lora's was the kind of breakdown that fell into a different category entirely, because somewhere deep down she had known this about Sarah for a long time. She had just been waiting for somebody to want to believe her.

After that our actual hitman fell into place pretty quickly: She had ideas already about whose arm Sarah could have twisted into offing somebody if she needed it. She even gave me warning with cool certainty that Sarah might have told some people that her father was a molester and her mother didn't give a damn enough to stop it, making me promise I wouldn't believe it. Like clockwork, this ended up being the excuse we got from the murderer. Lora had been my goldmine of information all along. She just needed to be handed the right amount of trust, but we'd sat there and let Sarah nudge her into looking at her shoes and backing down about how sure she was; we'd been too narrow about it to even consider interviewing the girls separately.

If some things had happened differently, I could have gone on punishing myself for all of this, maybe for the rest of my life. I had to forgive myself and Spock, or else forgive neither of us; in that way alone, we were still together.

 

 

I meant to tell Bones about running into Lora quite a while before I actually did. I'd gone back to work by then and he was too tied up to do more than talk to me via comms up until we made it out to the Patio one weekend.

Bones cocked his eyebrow once I'd finished, then asked, "And you've still got it?"

I set down my fork, reaching into my jacket pocket to show it to him. When I'm in possession of something irreplaceable I like to keep it on me, and the pendant was living in my leather getting cozy with the chip from Danek, which I still had yet to watch.

Bones let out a nervous note of a laugh. "You know you can't keep it."

I gave him an equally half-sarcastic smile. "I know." I started jabbing at my food again.

He was fully aware this wasn't something I'd be comfortable just sending to Spock, and that I also would feel irritatingly cowardly about sneaking up to leave it in his mailbox. I don't hang around doorsteps unless I've got something to say. He gave a weirdly sadistic tisk-tisking noise and said, "Well, this is quite a predicament."

"Yes," I said, not looking at him.

"Jim," he said, and I cringed inwardly at the mere tone of it. "How long are you fixing to go on like this?"

"I don't know what you're asking."

"The hell you don't."

My attention wandered over to give the eye to a teenager who seemed to be thinking too much about a tip left on an opposite table. I got back to my food, and as if by way of answering Bones I said, "I'll just get it to him through Rand, I guess."

"Well, you know he's not at homicide now, right?"

That made me look up.

"He's transferring. I would've figured you heard."

"I heard, yeah, but that's just a rumor," I said in automatic dismissal.

"No, it's not. He's put in for a position at Illegal Sciences."

Fork down again. "How do you know?"

"Chapel's involved with IS, remember? She mentioned it to me last time I ran into her."

"...Oh."

"Are you surprised he's got the rep?"

"No." I gave a little huff, almost amused. "Spock working Black Math?...I don't know, it's a pretty good match for him."

"It's also a little more prestigious, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but they're also more desperate, and he's probably the smartest person who's ever applied. And putting aside Op 86, his record's spotless enough that people are eager to call it a fluke." I shook my head. "One big fucking fluke."

Bones' brow was in a low thoughtful line. After a moment, it came out in a decided little rip: "What did he do, exactly?"

I looked at him intently, like I was sure he had to be joking. "...You're telling me you don't know."

"Well, _you_ never told me."

"Yeah, but anyone on Murder only had to take a smoke break to get the whole story, and you're telling me you've never heard anything?"

"Sure, here and there, but you think I'm the type of guy to take that rumor mill shit as the whole story? I mean, hell, one of the things I did hear was..."

He was almost shyly avoiding wording it, so I couldn't help sitting back and teasing it out of him with a look.

"I mean, I know he didn't _sleep_ with her," Bones muttered.

"...No," I said calmly. "He didn't."

"So what was it?"

"Think of the one thing that would be just as bad," I hinted slowly. After a moment, I added, "Something only a Vulcan could do."

It took him a second, and then he leaned back, something awestruck and confused written all over him. "Oh, no."

I just had my lips pressed together.

" _Why_?...And it was with...?"

"He performed a mind meld on Sarah March during the investigation, which effectively meant that any testimony against her from him and possibly also me—because on paper he was the primary on that case—would be very likely regarded as inadmissible." I let that sink in. "And even if that wasn't a problem, letting Spock get anywhere near that trial would have been a disaster. Any lawyer who's worth a shit could have spun it like it would be unimaginable for a guilty suspect to consent to doing a mild meld with a detective, and been all over the potential unreliability of an officer who would do that in the first place, the fact that it feels like coercive behavior...If you'd ever met Sarah you'd know she could have had a jury eating out of her hands, and I know I don't need to spell out for you the ignorance of an average ND resident when it comes to the technicalities of Vulcan mind melds, and—honestly? If Spock was just some detective I'd never met and I hadn't known him to be so straight-laced that he refuses _tea_ from citizens because we're not supposed to accept gifts, I'd think the whole thing was disturbing. I'd be dismayed that he's still a member of the squad after doing something like that with somebody involved with him through a case."

"You do know Spock, though," Bones said slowly and pointlessly, but he was staring off in the next second, all of it still sinking in. He demanded, "What did he think he was doing anyway?"

"Well, of course it went on way before either of us could have possibly imagined she'd be a suspect. And I don't even know, I never asked, but it was probably just..." I let out a defeated noise. "Trying to show her a couple things so that she'd feel like he knew what she was going through, like if she made it look like she was hesitant to confide in him at that point. Even when I'm sure he promised he wouldn't go poking around in her brain, you have to admire the nerve. She must have known she'd be able to use it, even then. I knew that there were times she came by the office to talk to him, but he never mentioned _that_. She had him around her finger so fast, and I never got the chance to notice."

For a long moment Bones just gave me a straight look, stern but consoling. "...Jim, his mother went missing when he was ten. Of course she was able to get to him."

"I know. I know, but at that point...finding that out made me feel like I didn't know who the hell he was anymore. I couldn't believe he'd done it, but it was also that he hadn't told me anything about it. I spent half an hour trying to tell Junior that there was no way in hell she wasn't lying until Spock showed up at the office and dropped the bomb that it was true."

The look was more shrewd now. "Why wouldn't he have even mentioned it by then? When he knew you were bringing her in for interrogation?"

I let out a long breath, shook my head. "I wanted to put off telling him, I guess. I was handling Sarah, he was off handling himself. He probably didn't even know until that morning."

"So the two of you weren't really communicating by then," Bones concluded. It didn't sound like this came as a surprise to him. "There was something else."

I hadn't exactly been deliberately hiding anything, but that didn't stop me from wishing I could get a thousand miles away from the conversation as soon as Bones started tapping harder at it. I was staring down and stiffening all over, probably looking oddly childish almost huddling into my off-day sweatshirt under my jacket.

"Jim, come on." Bones was more softly encouraging now, his most non-judgmental manners put into gear. He rarely did that with me; it was the knowledge that he was considering it that serious that broke me down.

"...There was one night," I finally said. "The case was getting to be hell, I wasn't thinking much straighter than he was by then and on top of that it seemed like things had started to really get to him literally overnight and I had no idea what I could do about it. And then...he wouldn't talk to me. Not like he would before. Not like we'd been friends for over two years. Suddenly I was a _colleague_."

I was speaking at a normal speed and volume but it felt like I was venting my guts out, like I had to pause for air. I couldn't look at Bones.

"And yeah, in some fucked up way that made some kind of sense in his head, I guess he was doing it to protect himself. But I thought maybe he'd calm down after a while, the case would get wrapped up for better or worse, things would settle back to how they were before. And then Sarah March sits down in our interview room and basically lets me know he's been blatantly ignoring my advice since the first week of the case...At that point I figured, maybe he doesn't need anything from me at all. I left...because he did that with her, he made that mistake, seemingly without thinking twice about it; and because...," I stammered, "because he did something good with me, and he could only act like it had been wrong."

Finally I checked in with Bones, who looked like he had a hell of a stomachache or like there was something he couldn't figure out. I scoffed in a tiny little frantic need to shake myself out of things.

"And even then, I still thought he'd at least try to stop me when I walked out." I moved to give the ice in my glass an idle shake, making a face at it, suddenly embittered with the realization: "The first time I heard a fucking peep out of him was when he thought I'd gotten killed. And I'm supposed to think that that's enough?"

Bones shifted into a wary, loaded expression. He said, "Jim...I saw him that night."

"...What?"

"The night they found Will's body."

"You..." I stammered, "You said that he was gone by the time you got there."

"Yeah well, I _lied_ , genius." He shook his head at me. "Dammit, I don't even know how to tell you what he looked like. I had to talk to him because even when I got there they were having a hard time getting him to talk to anyone and everybody pretty much agreed he needed to go home and let somebody else take this one. He'd just gotten the grand fucking scare of his life. And you were right, I was so pissed at the guy all those months just because I knew he'd cut you up pretty bad, I'd figured I'd want to sock him one the next time I ran into him, but I just couldn't hold a grudge after that. He found out you were on your way over and was making to beat it, and I asked him...I said, 'At least stick around long enough to tell him how sorry you are.' But he was just so sure nothing he did could change anything. It was then that I knew how bad it had to be, because...well, 'cause it happened to both of you."

"I don't need to be told it's not a picnic for him, Bones," I grumbled defensively. "That's just the way it is. Only if he was always going to freak out all over the first good thing that came along in his life in years, I wish I'd never met him."

"Oh," Bones said, with a sudden grimness, "don't you say that. I know that isn't true."

"And how exactly would you know that?"

"I'm not gonna play show-me-your-heartbreak-I'll-show-you-mine over this, I'm not gonna try to tell you what you should do. If you can't forgive him that's fair enough, but at least make sure you know what it is you're not forgiving." Bones shook his head a little incredulously. "That poor bastard learned some things nobody should ever have to learn, and he learned them _early_. And I know it's just as much his mistake as yours, but obviously your _timing_ was just about splendid. You might as well have been asking for all that shit he would have been dwelling on to rebound right onto you."

Bones rarely pulled this out, but he was doing aged wisdom on me, which he only did when he knew I couldn't argue that I knew better than he did. And I didn't. What I'd been through for the last several months was pretty complicated, but my personal life really couldn't compete with Bones. He'd been in the middle of an ugly divorce when we first met, but long before that there was something involving a teenage sweetheart with a dad who hated his guts; I'm not sure which one messed him up more or if it all got braided into his head in a string of each thing worsening the other, but I see the tells whenever I mention a woman he should try to get a date with. Bones knew he couldn't come close to understanding Spock any better than I did, but he knew something about worth and risk and quite a few things about regret.

"Shit," he said suddenly, checking a message on his comm. "I gotta go."

He was in a rush and looking apologetic, but I managed an excusing gesture and he patted me hard on the shoulder as he walked by. After a while I finished up and took a walk around the block a couple times, hunched over in the wind.

It was only when I was left alone that it hit me full-force, the fact that Spock was really transferring. In a very complicated corner of my mind this realization hurt like hell. It meant I could no longer unreasonably take for granted that he'd been nursing some hope that I would come back to Murder and that maybe somehow we'd be partners again.

I was reminded of my last month I'd spent before transferring, working on my own while Spock was on suspension. I worked until I found somebody who was willing to stick Sarah March with some serious charges after realizing half of what he thought about her was a lie and that she'd been conning him out of money for almost a year. Everyone knew and drew their own conclusions about my declaration that I was out as soon as I found a way to smear up Sarah's record. But all the times I'd stopped into the office, even with how I'd changed the entry code to my apartment and deleted his contact from my communicator, I was hoping every day he'd walk through the door just to come looking for me, and I wanted to bang my head against a wall for even thinking it. It wasn't just petty hope but petty bitterness that made me want him to stay in that office where he'd be forced to remember me forever.

On the surface of it, though, I knew that he may have actually been leaving because he had figured out before I even did that I would inevitably want to return. It gave me a grudging sense of irritation that after all that time, there could still be ways in which he knew me better than I knew myself. He would have known that I would hear he'd left, and he only wanted to nobly ensure that when I did come back, I wouldn't have to worry about him being there.

And still, there had to be something else to it that I was missing. It had always been a fundamental fact about Spock that he became a police officer in order to become a homicide detective; I'd never heard of him having any other aspiration.

Spock was no longer living on Vulcan by the time he was sixteen; it had a lot to do with his at best badly tended relationship with his father. I never knew much about the years he spent living on Terra until that strange migration instinct brought him inevitably to New Dublin, and I don't think he himself really understood that the reason he became a cop had anything to do with his mother.

My understanding of all that was more coherent: I knew from the start that nothing I did as a murder detective was ever going to undo what happened to my father, take back the sickening pain that happened to my mom or scorch the gloom out of the pages of the photo albums. With Spock, things must have been more muddled. You can hope like hell for something that makes no sense without realizing it's what you're doing, and I think Spock had truly believed that the past was in the past until he had a reason to start poking at it.

Maybe I should have taken it as a good thing that he was transferring. At first there was the unpleasant kick, that moment when you're reminded in the roughest way that people won't always move in the direction you'd expect. But it melted slowly into a genuine, tired relief. I told myself that the hardest thing that had made it so that I couldn't bear to think about Spock as anything other than a memory was how worried I was all that time that he would never, ever change.


	11. Chapter 11

It was nearing on two months after the night Rigen was arrested when I ran into Ken and Gaila.

It shouldn't have felt like much of a coincidence since it was roughly in their neighborhood. I'd been put on a job parked across the street ready to arrest a woman's ex for blowing his restraining order a second time. I was listening to the news and muttering something dry about a couple of teenagers playing grab-ass on their way down the next driveway, and the two of them slid right in, just happening to cross the street right in front of me.

Gaila had a paper bag slung over one shoulder and she was the one who felt me looking and turned her head to stick me with a gasping halt, as if her first instinct still was that she was seeing a ghost, like she had to remember. Ken's mouth was still moving when he realized she'd stopped, his hand that was connected in hers coming loose and pulling him back to where he saw what she was gaping at.

For a long second that curled up like something burning, we just stared at each other. And then as suddenly as if it only took them realizing they shouldn't be standing in the middle of the street, Ken took Gaila by the hand again and said something that could have been "Come on," and they walked across the street and up the sidewalk and out of my life.

Naturally I had heard things about the residents, and knew that probably only half of them were true. Black Math's Operation Amnesia was still storming through the streets looking for some gem of a witness who could recognize one of the residents from a time period previous to the memory overhaul. I heard that they were looking into finding a hormonal stimulant that might taste like vinegar and have traceable purchases. I heard some member of the force was temporarily implanted in their home for the purpose of protection, undoubtedly partly a euphemism for observing how normal they were (whether they could be assigned to the roles of regular people, whether they would be allowed to keep their identities, whether they would be able to apply for citizenship). To help with the identity crises, there was apparently a waiting list of hundreds of psychologists with varying degrees of actual qualifications, all probably hoping that one or more of the residents would not only pick their armchair but give the okay to publishing some of the clinical details.

I heard that there was general outrage from several members at the university over the possibility of the students not being allowed to return next semester. I heard that Professor Nichols began a huge petition effort gathering input from students and professors to persuade the higher faculty that the four were more than capable students even if their entry records were faked. I heard that Kara West had stopped returning calls, and that when asked by other students about the petition, she regularly changed the subject.

I kept checking glances at Ken and Gaila as they walked all the way down the crammed curving block, their shoulders occasionally bumping and their hands clasped safety together. I knew, despite anything Chris had said, that they would probably hate me forever, and I couldn't blame them one bit. I had forced my way into their safe and fought-for little homestead, touched them and eaten their cooking and mocked their affections simply by being there. I'd slept in Will's bed and kissed Danek and made Gaila promises that didn't belong to me, and in a way that is so buried that I can't grasp it close enough to get rid of, I may always love them. I would hope you couldn't blame me for that either.

 

 

It was good timing that I had the next couple days off; I went to a bar that night only about an hour before last call and I had every intention of getting shit-faced. After only one drink, though, I figured it wasn't going to make things look any better. I felt myself in a risky half-reckless state that would have stayed there without a few more beers either way.

I was turning the chip over in my hand again and again after I finished the last of a pint and clucked the glass down. It felt like I was chained down to the damn thing. I honestly wasn't sure anymore whether Danek had given it to me as a favor or if he felt I owed it to somebody to watch it. I had no way of knowing if he suspected this was in any way difficult for me. Eventually I growled out a mumbled curse and tucked it back into my pocket, slapped a tip onto the bar and left.

As if to honor the tradition of being too drunk to think about getting my bike from the station across the street, I decided in an impulsive stupor that I was going to walk home. This wasn't the worst idea ever at the time, but within an hour the weather closed on me like a trap. Rain.

The downpour brought a slowly settling cold that started off as manageable, but once it settled and soaked into every crevice of me and my clothes, I was shivering all over and thinking how fast I would sell my soul for a warm bed. I could have easily commed a cab, but I kept walking.

It was me against the city that night and I was going to win. I imagined her as something in a constant torrential tantrum, the abandonment by her founders leaving the city to fend savagely for itself, and I couldn't understand why she had to keep taking and taking when all I ever did was do every little thing I could to try to fix her. I stayed my ground and I jammed my way across the curbs and through the rain and up the slick steps with the cold bannister until I could swear there was a sighing tingle through the air, a softer acceptance that took me with an exasperated grip on the shoulders through the right door with a grudgingly mumbled _Fine_ , my boots seeming to scratch across the soft of the doormat with a groan of relief.

I bumped hard into the kitchen table, keeling over and clenching my teeth together to stop myself from letting out some oafish noise. I leaned down and let my air go back out, patted the wood lightly to visualize in the pitch black of the apartment as I straightened back up.

After a moment the silence and stillness of the place reached out for me in too-quiet twitches of non-noise. I knew he was there, probably at the end of his little hallway with his bedroom gun raised lightly up. Any second now he was going to snap in and demand who I was and how I got in here; the simple buzzing awareness of that made the corners of my mouth pull up, brazenly daring against the rest of my mood to take the comfort. My hand reached back over the table formed into a fist, and I knocked seven sure notes against the wood.

There was some motion or gasp that reminded me of a piano's soft pedal going down in the echo of a large room. A few seconds and then he flicked the light on.

Spock's height filled the threshold; through the bruises of light adjustment in my eyes the moment reminded me, oddly, of Rigen stumbling back against the counter when the lights tapped on in that other kitchen. Even though Spock's alarm was much more muted, I don't think he would have looked any more shocked if he'd just come out to find the ghost of Surak looting through his fridge. His mouth was opened a bit and he checked his eyes around the kitchen as if, upon evaluating that it really was me, perhaps this wasn't actually his home after all. Finally his eyes came back to where I was standing. He looked like he was a little short of breath.

At long last all I managed to mumble was, "Why did you move your table?"

He made some progress actually getting into the kitchen at this point, walking in steady steps until we were a couple feet apart. "You are drunk," he decided. It sounded disappointed.

"Uh, no," I said honestly, though my words were coming out scratchy and fragmented as my eyes wandered beyond them somewhere at the floor. "I was at Da Livet's bar, you know the one, and I thought I'd walk home, but I got all the way to Port Place and it was raining and I'm _really_ cold, and I figured while I'm sort of close to here..."

"Port Place." Spock thought about it. "The distance from there to your apartment is one-point-two miles less than the distance from Port Place to here."

"Well that must be why I'm so fucking tired," I grumbled.

I really was; I was swerving with it. Everything looked too-bright and blotted. After a minute when Spock looked like he was going to ask me for some further explanation and then didn't dare, he said, "You require dry clothing."

I gave him a little nod, and he walked down the hall to his bedroom.

It seemed to take him too long. I ended up leaning against the wall in the hall wondering in what way he was methodically putting himself together in there. I heard a small thump like a drawer closing and he appeared with a folded pair of grey pajamas.

I'd borrowed them before, I was pretty sure, even though it had been rare for us to crash here rather than at my place. His face was vague in the dark of the hallway as he held them out to me and my mind was rewinding to long back when we were still at the stage when there were comfort limits, when I had to convince him yes, it's really okay for you to sleep on my couch; I remembered him emerging comfortably enough from the bathroom in my sweatpants and t-shirt and how it had given me a feeling that reminded me of my mom painstakingly arranging her art collection on the walls because of the way finally something would just snap into place and she'd step far back and take it in with a little pleased hum: _Yes, I think I like you just there, just like that_.

I reached and grasped around the neat square of clothes, but then I went still. Then I was squeezing to pull the cloth forward and then I was squeezing and pulling at Spock's forearms and then I was kissing him full on the mouth. It was a tense insistent action, too firm and brief to really mean anything other than "Fuck you." I pulled away as quickly as the pajamas hit the floor, before I could let myself think about him not kissing me back or anything as pathetic as that. He was still cryptic in the dimness but that was why the movement took me by surprise: I almost let out a kind of yelp when my collar was yanked up and my legs were tripping backwards until my back hit up against the wall and he was falling in against me hard as his mouth took mine back in a trembling rush of warm and wet.

The rain was pummeling against every window as Spock and I breathed out the same long breath, hips pressing hard against each other and Spock's hands digging a hard squeeze over my collarbones. For the second time I was a little taken aback at how good he was at this, urgent like his brain was on the other side of the galaxy but not in a fumbling flurry, just slow enough to make me go insane. It felt like I hadn't been touched by anyone in so long; even with the residents there had been this film covering it when any of them touched me, like I was stuck alone under my own skin. I clung to him hungrily, frantically, clutching at his ribs and his backbone through his clothes as if his body could tell me that underneath the surfaces and scratches of half a year apart, the core of him was still there.

Spock's hands moved up my neck, my face, rocking my head into a new angle and fingering at my hair and my cheekbone...

Something made him sort of flinch. I heard some half-uttered word that sounded like my name as his mouth pulled away. In a deep and almost shaky tone, Spock said, "You are hurting."

I felt dizzy. Yes, I wanted to say, I am fucking hurting. I'm worrying my skin off about four people who hate my guts and I have no way of knowing if they're going to be okay and I feel like the biggest creep in the universe and I've never been so lonely in my life but none of it even adds up to how much I've missed you, and it was true, it took me until I came over there and laid eyes on him again to even realize that. That wasn't what I said.

"Put your hands on the wall," I said, nudging him away at the wrists. "It's not fucking fair that you can do that—I don't get to feel what you feel, I don't know what the hell you're feeling. _Off_ —" I clutched at his arms and positioned them under mine to where, after a second of thinking too hard about something, he slid them up so that his hands were flat on the wall alongside my shoulders. I pulled him back into kissing me hard and deep, clutching him in around the waist, fingers digging sharply at his back and his clothes. Spock kept at it my way for a while but then he started to mouth at my jaw and my neck with tiny desperate half-noises and I needed it to stop; I was starting to think I believed Bones about how much it had wrecked his head seeing me dead. On either side of my chest his forearms were shaky, as if they were holding up something heavy.

Now he was pulling his mouth away and just burying his face into my shoulder, keeping his hands on the wall but pulling his arms up and snug around me until he was clutching into me tightly. Some thought or other had kicked him back into higher conscience, and all he wanted to do now was stand like that. It took me a second for my mind to catch up to it, that I was standing in Spock's hallway with Spock and hugging the crap out of _Spock_.

"Come on," I whined, giving him a shake.

After the couple seconds it took him to make sure his voice was all cool and steady he said, "It would not be advisable for us to go further."

I almost wanted to push him off me. It felt like he would weigh a ton if I tried. "...'Cause you'll regret it again," I muttered.

"I would this time." He was the first to move then, pulling me by an arm just enough to direct me down the hall. "You need rest."

"I don't need the bed," I mumbled.

He ignored that. Treating me as if I was actually drunk, and to be honest I functionally wasn't doing much better than smashed, he turned the light on for me so I wouldn't trip on anything and did something with the bedsheets while I changed.

As soon as I crumbled into the bed on my side he was throwing a comforter over me that made a cool gust. My eyes were already closed and I didn't immediately think to wonder why he sat down at the edge of the bed. He'd noticed something.

I opened my eyes just enough and registered the very careful movement, him easing at the top button of my shirt without touching my skin. He opened the flannel down just enough to identify the top of the charm that I'd started wearing under my clothes.

I was stringing together the whole explanation for why I'd been given it and why I still had it and why the hell I was _wearing_ it and all that came out sounded like, "Sorry." But he was looking down at where it sat on my chest with this merely pensive, miles-away look, something almost more sentimental than sad going on in his eyes.

After a moment he simply buttoned the shirt back up over the pendant, rubbing his thumb down the cloth just slightly and up to brush at my shoulder and pull the blanket up an inch farther. He slowly stood up, clicked the light off, and closed the bedroom door behind him.

How can I even begin to explain me and Spock? There are partnerships and then there are partnerships. Those two years we had, they're still ripe and golden when I think of them, like I somehow knew to take notes, that I would need to remind myself some day.

One night when I really wanted to see one based on a book we spent two hours at the Revival Cinema trying to figure out a malfunction with the central computer, swapping opinions about fellow officers while the manager promised us free admission for eternity if he didn't have to call a mechanic. For the rest of the year we strolled into under-attended midnight showings and sat in the back row talking shop until Spock decided this was one he might actually want to pay attention to or until I fell asleep on his shoulder. Spock was a man who considered gambling to be the utmost example of irrationale and vowed to Rock that he would buy him the most expensive wine available at Joubert's if the guy ever breached my solve rate. One time we took on the weather of a crazed shootout at a shopping mall just two blocks from where we'd been getting lunch and he ended up knocking me so hard out of the way of a bullet when I was looking in the wrong direction that my hip got dislocated, and he had to tolerate my vulgar whining about the pain while we waited for the medics to find us, but the whole time I was quietly squeezing his wrist in a gesture of gratitude.

I could tell you that the first time I got stuck with a child murder case, I couldn't stop seeing the four-year-old on the examination table and I was expecting some logically eloquent version of the this-is-why-we-do-what-we-do but instead got a tactfully silent Spock who sat next to me outside of the morgue in compassionate patience. He eventually had some misplaced empathetic notion that he was going to share a cigarette with me and then gallantly overdid it to where he was coughing for a minute straight and the picture of it made me laugh to the brink of tears.

I could tell you about what we did that one night, after driving through the woods, when I took him to my apartment and got his skin under my clothes and we were shoulder to shoulder on my bed watching something on the screen with unseeing exhaustion, and how our hands had loosely locked into each other without even a second of it feeling strange. When he kissed me, I didn't think for a moment and didn't think for those six months and don't think now that it was a mistake. There wasn't anything in my head about our jobs and protocol and moments of shared emotional weakness and what might happen in the morning. I was with a man who held my life in his hands and gave me his, every single day, and a part of me had always known, deep down, even through my somewhat earnest attempts at dating other people when I got that kind of lonely, that nothing else was ever going to add up to what that meant to me.

When he wanted me, I handed him my heart like it was nothing. It was like saying, "Oh, right, that's yours. I was wondering if you were ever going to come by and get it."

 

 

I didn't wake up until noon. Spock had obviously gone to work, but having been too dead to even pick up any stirrings of him leaving in the morning, the total silence of the apartment took me a little by surprise.

In the shower I got the first kick of voracious hunger, a big feeling of void that wasn't just there because I hadn't eaten in over eighteen hours. Spock's smell was everywhere, getting under my skin with a treacherous warmth. Despite the appetite I felt like my body wouldn't want to keep anything down, and I couldn't get myself to go for a walk to shake the dust off. I considered leaving. Instead I borrowed a pair of the closest thing to sweatpants I could find and then picked up my jacket from where it had been folded on top of the dresser, digging the chip out of the pocket and then holding it in my teeth as I went out to Spock's underused sitting room and set up his dusty view-screen. Once I got the message playing I slowly crossed the little room and sat down, and watched Will sitting across from me on the screen through the cold haze of the afternoon.

The message was about thirty minutes long. Will was different here than he appeared around the others on the PADD footage we'd watched, though I wasn't sure in what way. I could tell there was nothing all that grim about whatever had led him to decide to make the recording; it had a lighthearted hypothetical tone to it when Will said with a weak little smile at the triteness of it, "If you are watching this, I guess I'm dead."

Though it was a little too close up to tell for sure, I guessed he was sitting on his bed, possibly recording himself with his PADD propped up against a pile of books. There was a slight tilting bump as he adjusted his legs.

"Whatever made things end up that way, I hope everyone else is okay. I'm assuming, uh...I should talk like I'm talking to just you, Danek, but it's up to you whether you ever decide to show this to the others. I'm...sorry that you have to be the one to make that decision, but it seems the most fair." He looked to the side, biting his bottom lip, raking a few fingers through his hair for a moment. "If this isn't too far in the future from when I'm recording this, I'm hoping you might recall that day you caught up to me at the...the little creek bridge, do you remember, when I walked out of that movie and you were asking me what was wrong? I told you, really pretty much out of the blue, that I wished I could tell you, that there might as well be anthologies of things I wished I could tell you that I couldn't. And you didn't understand, because you always thought it was me more than the rest who would have never told anyone a thing.

"I'm about to explain to you what that was all about, but I need to say, and you won't understand this, but I need to say it: I'm breaking a promise that I made to you by telling you this. I'd like to say this is all because I need you to look after everyone like I did, but, maybe it isn't all that. Maybe I'm being a little selfish. I don't particularly want to die a liar, so...This is all going to sound like the craziest thing you've ever heard, but I think, if you really think about it, you'll believe that it's true."

I felt a tightness working in my chest and swallowed, as Will scratched nervously at his jaw.

Finally he let out some nervous but gentle laugh, and he started in with, "I guess the good news, Danek...is that I've known you for your entire life."

For the time being, I skipped over the technical stuff. I would be curious about it later—after all, this was my front seat ticket to evidence that no one else outside of Illegal Sciences was able to touch—but I felt this anxious need to get to the end.

Somewhere in the middle: "Now, there's some stuff I want to tell you about the rebooting just because there are some things about it that aren't really as bad as you'd imagine. For one thing, I didn't make up all those emotional horror stories for you, _you_ all did, and trust me, I was a little blown away by what you were willing to...put in there, but what we went through was worse." Will looked to the side for a second, and there was something distant and haunted he had to immediately tamper down. "So much worse. Of course I'm not going to tell you any of that, but I just want you to understand that we wanted... _so_ badly, just to be normal, and for the most part, we decided that was never going to work unless we could think we were.

"For reasons that I won't go into, it was decided, mostly by my willingness, that I was going to stay behind. Since I had to reboot all of you individually, I had to do half of the work with the memory systems. It took months for us to put them together, and if it weren't for how scared we were of getting caught, I'd say I remember that time pretty fondly. See, your memories aren't real, but the way that you react to them and the way you think about the world, it isn't artificial. I was able to work with these replicated betas of your brain patterns in the computer system to test what would work and what wouldn't, and it was the biggest chore just getting one trait at a time to sink in. That was a flaw of the system for...them, for what they wanted to use it for, but for what we wanted it was this beautiful thing, that you could construct this whole paradigm of thought patterns and work it out with all the technical perfections, but sometimes, it just wouldn't take. Even our psychology is only partially mechanical and there are ways that you were all born to be, and if I couldn't get the network to go one way, I had to go with something else. It took ages, but it was sort of fun, us bent over the blueprints of our futures in that basement..."

Will's voice tapered off, and he looked up at the ceiling for a moment and seemed to calm himself with a seething little breath.

"Some time after we escaped, once we had everything together, I had to let you all go. For a while. The reboots were timed to happen all at once; you had to be sleeping, because if you were awake you might collapse on the sidewalk or something. I had to put you all in separate rooms in separate hostels or motels, where no one was friendly enough to give you the stories wrong. You were all going to wake up and think that you just got into the city from wherever...I had to leave all of you alone in those rooms, for some of you I had to help you fall asleep...I had to leave, knowing that you would wake up having no idea who I am.

"You're probably wondering how we all came to here over the question of us staying together. The easy thing to do, naturally, would have been to set up a couple false memories just at the beginning, so that there would be some rapport between us. We debated this for _weeks_. After all, it had to be unanimous. But you were the one who pointed out the deciding factor: Did we really want to have fake memories of each other? We were all so scared of being without each other, but the temptation was strong to just let it be, to see if we could find each other all over again and just start over, just let things be...Most people don't get a chance to take that kind of leap of faith with themselves. But I don't think any of us imagined it working out the way it did, even at our most optimistic."

Will's eyes were glazed over with something grave; but then he grinned.

"...Orientation. See, of course you know how we all 'met,' but...I want to tell it to you like you don't. I need you to hear it like I experienced it." He let out a long puff of air. "Of course I staged a lot of it, but I had no idea what was going to work out. I was thinking I'd be lucky if I managed to get to having some kind of relationship with maybe a couple of you, and the rest, I'd just have to find some way to keep an eye on. Move into the same neighborhood or something like that...

"But the way it happened, I could not believe my luck. Ken came up to the front of that classroom and it was like we were just two random guys who liked each other instantly. And then Gaila and Ken, like it was by the script, she just fell in next to him and introduced herself to us like there was no one else in that room she could have hung out with. For a time I could have completely forgotten she didn't think she knew us. I didn't know whether to be overjoyed or completely freaked out that it was all going to bomb, because clearly something hadn't worked, it didn't take. Toni walked in and Ken started smartassing right off the bat. And..." Will laughed. "Here's the thing, Danek, even with you having nowhere else to sit, I could have royally screwed that up. You were snootily taking notes about what the department chair was saying and I _should_ have counted up my luck and let it go. I should have tried to bump into you somewhere else at a later time, but I just, I saw that you were reading Devallt for some class, and you know how I feel about that crap, so I wrote you some snarky note about quality literature and slid it right over and then for a second I completely panicked and could not believe I had just done that...But you know what you did. You didn't _appreciate_ having your reading choices randomly insulted by a total stranger, but you wrote me back and that was enough. It was like you might as well have called me out by my name. I was so relieved I could have cried."

Will came out of a sigh, suddenly looking off as if checking the time.

"It's not like it was always a picnic, though. There were moments when I could tell I was being a little too familiar, and it was dangerous for it to occur to any of you that there was something strange about me, so things went very slowly. I had times when I was worried we'd never be more than just academic acquaintances, that I'd have to let you go and just get out of touch with you after we graduated. But that one night when we went out for drinks after Ken's performance, things started to turn for the better. You all would just laugh it up if you knew what those days were like for me when you weren't looking. I lost so much sleep over you. But it was amazing, getting to discover everyone like that. You were all recognizably the same, but you were _new_. You were all so perfect. I didn't get to start over, but with all of you around me growing into yourselves...I'd never thought I could ever be that happy. There were times when things crept up on me and I got pretty depressed about everything. Danek, it wasn't just that day...Sometimes I wanted to just yank you aside and spill everything because I felt sort of lonely about everything. But then: 'No pasts.' Because of that, it was like it was okay if I was in a lot of pain that I couldn't begin to explain. We had these moments when we were there for each other without actually having to talk about it, and it was no different for me."

The blue of his eyes kept getting cut into with something for only half a second at a time, something boyish and wounded slotting through the facade. "Anyway, I guess I've been accepting to some degree, as irrational as it is, that things came together so well for us because it was impossible for every part of you to completely forget. There has to be a reason we kept picking each other's tables, like we were all still connected somehow because there were parts of you that still knew. And I hope if you ever have to watch this that it all doesn't come as too much of a shock."

He sat up in a self-straightening little shake. "I'm not going to be alone at the house for much longer so I need to finish this up." A hesitation, a nervous but pure smile breaking over his features. "God, I really hope I've gotten to the point where I've said this already. I really...I love you, and I hope you know that. All of you. And I hope that you can believe me when I tell you that everything's going to be okay. Don't argue with me either, it really is."

He gave a lazy salute after a few seconds. He said, "Okay. Take it easy."

The screen went black. For the next few minutes I sat where I was with my elbows rested forward on my legs, feeling like I was never going to be able to move from that spot.

It was strange, remembering that hateful way I'd thought about the vague face of whoever had rewritten the residents' memories, not understanding that it could have been done out of love and that the real villain was whoever had pushed them to want to get free of themselves. I thought of what it must have been like for him encountering the first real problem with their plan, and I just wanted to reach months back and through the impossible fog and shake him and ask him why in God's name he never thought to try to come and find me.

The reality that was finally thoroughly getting its hooks in me with a strange new pain was that even if Will and I had ever chanced across each other in the grand coincidence cocktail of New Dublin, he would have had every reason to think of me as the enemy. He would have gone running in the opposite direction before I even had the chance to do a double take.

I'd thought more and more about what Chris had been trying to tell me about the probability of the residents telling us anything, about Gaila and how bizarre it would have seemed to me in a more routine job for two people to have a secret and for it to have never quite hit me when I was around her that there was an elephant in the room except for at the very end. Will had nudged them into an atmosphere where the best way of coping with something was to forget about it completely, and maybe there was more to "No pasts" than just memory preservation. It was all Will's life insurance policy, the best he could do to keep protecting them if anything could ever happen to him. If he knew where their names came from, he probably knew that I was a cop, and the message that he gave to Gaila even if it wasn't in so many words was _I don't want you to mention this again to anyone—not even if it's me._ Maybe Chris was right. Maybe she almost never did. It may be far-fetched to imagine Will could have possibly suspected I would ever do something like what I did, even as a brief interrogation stunt, but paranoia is nothing if not thorough.

Will was closer to me and yet farther from me than a son or brother could ever be, and I really had no business thinking I knew anything about him at all. He had been at my game right where I left off without really any choice in the matter, and it had become his entire life. It's not that I think that what I've seen of him is all faked and part of his own masks he used to fit in with society and with the others; it's that even when I know the truth I don't know where the façade ends and where the rest of him begins, and that makes him better at this than I ever could have been.

Try to imagine it: a genius hacker who practically can't even tie his own shoes. Maybe he was able to whip himself up some downloads of practical information, but you'd need some semblance of street smarts to even know what you'd need to learn in the first place, and unlike the others, he didn't get the software-packaged deal. Pretty much anything he would want to do for himself, anything that somebody else couldn't have used him for, he would have had to learn on his own. He would have had to study up during every waking hour just to be able to appear normal, not to mention mentally healthy, so that nobody would pick up on all the holes.

I knew, not very happily, that I was going to think about him every day for the rest of my life. I would think back to something that happened, when I was getting a tongue-lashing from Junior over at Murder or while I was yawning over a case file with Spock thinking aloud at me from the kitchen, and I would be unable to help wondering where Will was at that time, who he was with and what he was figuring out and how I took for granted how simple things really were for me.

I wondered if, after all the times he'd likely been made aware of criminal lust for wealth, he understood at all what people wanted money for until he got out into the big treacherous world. I wondered if he knew what to do about the body of somebody he wanted, if he was ever quite capable of wanting. With an inexplicable sadness, I pictured him stuck in front of a vending machine for minutes and minutes on end, hands moving anxiously from one knob to the next, wondering what type of cigarettes a man like William Kenley was supposed to smoke.

 

 

"Are you going to stand there all afternoon?" I asked without quite looking over.

Spock had been motionless in the entryway for several minutes and I hadn't had the energy to acknowledge it until then. In response he moved a bit carefully into the room, and with my eyes trained somewhere down at the carpet I mostly only felt him take the seat next to me on the couch.

"Pretty late in the day for a lunch break," I commented.

"I took a number of leave days I had saved up."

"So are you among the members of IS who have seen this?" I asked, nodding my head up at the screen.

"Yes," Spock replied. When there was nothing else to do but attempt some grim form of conversation he added, "I thought it was notable that Will does not mention whether there were ever any others. Did he seem to you likely to omit that information because the others would find it troubling?"

"Yeah, that would seem pretty self-evident, though we have no way of knowing just how much he was playing along with what the others wanted from him. I've really got no clue." The hint of a grimace on my face cooled down. "So they don't care about letting you help with the case even though you're a source?"

"Some felt that it could become useful for a genetic source to be involved in the investigation, should the survivors need some inspiration to place more trust in our particular subdivision." Spock spoke slowly, sounding unusually as if it took effort for him to organize his thoughts. "One member found my sudden transfer to be 'serendipitous'...The assumption may be the opposite of how my involvement will be perceived, but in any case, I have yet to meet any of the residents."

I shrugged. "How are they treating you at IS?"

He hesitated, then gave the shallow common-ground answer. "The company is comparably inoffensive. I am favorable to the lack of Walsh's company, among other things."

"...How are you?" I asked more quietly. "Really."

I looked at him straight then, if only for a second, before I went back to picking at strands on the blanket I was sitting on. He was cocking a fragile hesitant eyebrow.

"It's not like I like the idea of you becoming some depressing shut-in. Are you doing okay? Have you talked to your father lately or anything?"

"I have, actually, recently been in regular contact with him," Spock said.

I had not expected that, and could only sit there blinking.

"Your culture would call it, I believe, a 'mid-life crisis,' putting aside the exact numbers of my father's age, that seems to have inspired him to rebuild a relationship with me." Spock paused for a long moment like it took a lot of effort for what he was about to say. "He told me for the first time that he loved my mother, and that...things may have been easier for both of us had he realized the emotional necessity of admitting this to me."

I made a sad little scoff. "Wow. I mean...I don't know, for me that might be too little too late."

"It changes nothing about the past. But I am grateful that he said it."

I nodded. Not knowing what to do after that, I nodded again.

The question came with surprising softness. "Are you alright?"

Something like an entire minute ticked by. I said, "I don't know."

I didn't look at him through another slow swarm of thoughts, gathering my words.

"You know that I used to handle a lot of robberies, before I first went UCD?" I finally began. "I would talk to all these people and these families, who would look so...disturbed. There was always something in their faces that was more complicated than just, 'My stuff is gone,' and I could never really understand that. That sense of violation when you come home and your place is ransacked...I just don't think I've ever felt that way about my apartment, you know."

I let out a sigh before I went on.

"When I found out that Sarah March got into your head...I think I understood it then." I looked over, swallowing, and Spock was staring forward instead of at me but his breath seemed to have picked up. "But then...I went and did something like that to someone else."

"Jim." Spock was talkative now: "That is hardly a comparison you can logically make."

I shrugged.

"What I did was inexcusable."

"Which thing that you did are we talking about?"

"If the mind meld is what you can understand and possibly excuse, it would be preferable if it were that one, but I suspect that won't long be the case."

I felt myself almost smiling, but it didn't make it. "...Sometimes I still can't believe we ever got here. I wonder how it's possible I haven't just thrown in the rag and forgiven you. But then I remember how _easy_ it seemed for you. To just let me go..."

Spock took me by surprise: Before I looked over his knees were on the floor, his legs scooting around because he needed to be face-to-face with me. He looked almost ragged, tired in the eyes, and one of his hands met my knee. I flinched just a little, interrupting before he could say anything.

"I knew it was a rough time for you, okay, and I did everything I could. I would have done anything you asked, and you turned on it and you fucked me out of your life. You could have said you needed some space for a while, and instead you _stopped being my friend_. It was like you were looking for an _excuse_ to have me gone. Do you even know how much that fucked up my head?" It was hard to believe I was still a little terrified of having this conversation. I wanted so badly not to have to walk out the door again, I was almost shaking with it.

"There are things that I need you to attempt to understand, Jim, but I do not know where to begin." Spock looked up at the ceiling, that politely lost expression rare but familiar to me. "In a distant perspective it does seem preposterous, that I could possibly allow something that happened to me twenty years ago to interfere with my current life. But as much as it makes no sense to say so, it did not feel during that case like it happened twenty years ago."

I tried to say something; he cut me off.

"Jim. Do you recall that night at the tavern when you were almost in an altercation with Detective Hardy...?"

I blinked. "Who?"

"Paris Hardy." Spock clarified, "Rock."

"...His name is _Paris_? Anyway, which time?" I asked with a roll of my eyes, but then said, "Yeah, when he started saying that Amanda could have just been alive somewhere after intentionally abandoning her son? And wouldn't shut up about it?"

With a sidelong look at nothing in particular, Spock said, "He did not know anyone present could have held it as a highly personal matter."

"Still."

"My point is," Spock slowly went on, "I've come to realize that I did in fact spend 20 years believing in some suppressed aspect of my mind that his theory is true."

I wanted, irrationally, to argue with him. Nothing came out.

"Coherently, I knew it was not true. One of the difficulties with Vulcan values is being unable to recognize natural psychological fallacies, such as denial. It becomes easy to overlook obstacles to logic when it is deemed logical to deny the existence of emotion. I was not only dealing with my mother's disappearance, but I was discouraged from expressing my grief. I had to process it very privately, and in the mind of a young child, certain troubling conclusions weren't as effectively avoided as they could have been. You yourself remarked from numerous comments I made that night we spoke of it, that you detected I hold myself guilty for what happened, as if she could have been found if only I could have remembered."

I frowned, remembering that night: back aisle of the Revival during a black and white horror movie, a forgotten flask of booze in my left hand as my right kept squeezing around his elbow in weak speechless consolation.

"This was all only an accessory to the fact that this incident happened during a time of my youth when I felt pressured to navigate what I thought was an impossible balance between my Vulcan culture and my mother's ways, and how I perceived the two as mutually exclusive. What I understood was that my mother was somehow taken away from me as punishment for the grief that came after, or for the extent of my emotional control that occasionally frustrated her beforehand. I felt that she'd left because I wasn't human enough, and that my planet mocked me in its turn because I simply had the audacity to be hurt."

"I know. I know all of this," I said.

I felt like I already knew. Surely I did. Even with the fact that it seemed to contradict half of what I knew about Spock and what had attracted me to him from the start, when he'd seemed like this tantalizingly self-possessed man who hated above all else being told that he was supposed to do certain things because he was a certain thing, be it his human or his Vulcan half. The guy at the office who could be persuaded to come out for a drink simply with the jeering implication that Vulcans don't have fun, who made a damn good detective because most people didn't know what to expect from him and because they almost always thought that they did. I'd always affectionately imagined him in his teenage years strolling off of Vulcan in a gesture that was meant as an insult to everything there that had ever made him feel like a disappointment and then delving into and through his life as the person he was when I met him, the reserved stoic presence with an occasional show of emotion that was shameless and matter-of-fact. But maybe I had that wrong. Maybe it took him meeting me for that calm certainty in himself to come out.

"There was one morning," he suddenly said, "one of the first days after our night together, when there was already an amount of tension between us but I wasn't yet sure that our relationship was irreparable. And then I noticed the way you'd carefully flinch away from any possibility of even accidental contact with me...You weren't allowing me to touch you."

"God dammit," I dug the heel of a hand at my forehead. "I was barely able to figure out how I felt about everything, of course I didn't want you dealing with it too. I was kind of...I don't know, humiliated? You're not about to try to tell me you thought I was giving _you_ the brush-off, you'd already started being a dick to me by then."

"No." He shook his head. "It's that I thought you were trying to demand more from me. As if I thought it was inevitable that you would ask me to be something I had no confidence I could be."

"You thought I was giving you the all-or-nothing," I said, disbelieving. "I made it pretty clear that nothing had to change."

"It seemed to me that your actions said otherwise. Without the ability to read your emotions, I was at a loss. I had this perception, from everything I'd felt from you that night, that you would surely want more from me than I felt capable of giving, and that you were permanently withdrawing our more longstanding forms of intimacy. Suddenly it was as if our relationship was polarized between the possibility of less than what it had been or more than what it had been, with no kind of compromise we could return to." Spock sort of shrugged, and it was one of the saddest little movements I'd ever seen. "Regardless of what I truly wanted, I chose less. I evaluated that there was no other option. I am sorry."

I was trying to speak, but I felt something like fury clamping up my vocal cords.

"There were times afterward, when I thought to myself it was all effectively done. I believed I had logically averted some great emotional disaster, because of how surely I knew that you could hurt me." Spock's face took on a dark, distant edge. "...Then I found you dead."

"...It isn't fair," I finally said, at an angry volume. "You were _never_ an open book with me, not how I was with you. I never hid anything from you and I never asked for anything back, and then the one day I start to withhold any of that..."

I was moving up to walk away and I didn't even realize it until his hands were on me, clutching at my clothes. He just said, "Jim."

"Stop."

"Why did you describe feeling like Sarah March had done something violating?" The question was as sudden as a slap, like he'd wanted to ask it all along. "Did you begrudge that I've never mind melded with you?"

"Fuck you," I groaned, an undertone of desperation rising in me, but my heart had started slamming. "It's not like there's anything good for me in there."

I must have known, somewhere in me, how wrong I was. Spock just said, "Please," and the muscles that had been protesting against his grasp surrendered me to the couch and the clutch of his hands up my legs as we slipped some immediate way or the other into a knotted, fevered kiss. I felt like I wanted to push him off of me or push myself all the way under his skin, I couldn't decide which one; after a long pulsing moment Spock was sinking down to wrap his arms around my torso, his head buried almost down into my lap. I patted over his hair with trembling fingers, and after a minute he muttered, "Let me show you."

I couldn't have possibly predicted the magnitude it could have, simply for him to show that he was willing and completely unafraid of anything I might see, as if I already knew there was no going back. The shift was terrifying and elating. In an abrupt hiccup of protest I said, "But there are going to be days when I feel like we don't deserve this. When I think about the Marches, or I think about Will. I'm going to have a hard time with that. You know that? Things aren't going to be easy with us, but—fuck, I just need to—"

He moved up to me with an urgency deepening in his eyes, a hand rubbing up the back of my neck and then tightening there as he shut me up by kissing me again. And then _Jesus_ , we were kissing. Spock's hands came forward and fisted at the fabric of the blanket, yanking it forward to slip me off the edge of the couch so that my legs tumbled in around him and I tightened them, gasping just to feel myself against him through the thin fabric. We slid together to the floor, Spock moving in on top of me, sliding a hand under my waistband and caressing me with a surprising confidence through the nervous breathing and beating of his heart I could feel as I felt around his hips. It made me slowly ebb into losing my mind.

Spock's remaining tremors of hesitation very gradually dissolved; he started peeling me bare and then he was jacking me a little and then slowly, slowly working his fingers in me, his eyes fixed nakedly on mine now that our mouths had broken apart as if he thought I would disappear the second he looked away. It occurred to me, suddenly and inexplicably, that this was possibly the bravest thing he'd ever done, that he knew we were both a little bit insane for running back to each other but that nothing else would ever make as much sense.

In several minutes' time I was fully naked and rocking restlessly underneath him, mindlessly urging him into me. I saw a broad swallow of his adam's apple before he said, "If I initiate a meld during intercourse, Jim, I likely won't be able to have much focus or authority over what it is you see...The memories are more unpredictable—"

"Do you want it?" I demanded in a gasp.

"Yes." He seemed powerless not to nod, a fervent movement. "I—"

He sputtered into a hot gasp; I was reaching all the way down to give him a few insistent strokes and then impatiently beginning to guide him in, pushing my hips up to meet him with one leg cocked around his waist, one of my hands squeezing good and hard at his back when he gave in, his hand reaching up to clutch down into my other palm. He let his body rock into it, mouth and eyes widening as he almost lost it in the feeling and his body pressed farther down into me. Groaning in a kind of agreement, I felt those hollowing jitters of electricity again deep in my stomach, felt ruthless and determined and moved my mouth up to his in a harshly daring kiss. In the next second he was buckling to thrusting in again and again, pushing me back down by a shoulder, lining up his hand at the side of my face and then pushing me everywhere, pulling down and down. I felt the second of vertigo like rolling too quickly through torrents of every nerve on his body and then my head was locking into place, and all I could think with sudden huge wonder was his name.

The thoughts and memories came as fluidly as a reflex or something flowing through my veins, flicking between my thoughts as if they were mine. What it reminded me of, both suddenly and gradually, was watching the recordings of Will. I was seeing myself through the condensed lenses of Spock's life and it was like I didn't even know who this man was who was supposed to be me. When you take on a cover you have to accept how little control you have over how others will react to the little things, but no one ever realizes the power other people have on you just in everyday life, that we don't really get to pick our own passwords. It all played across my mind in the gently pocketing way anyone ever knows anyone, unfolding through me the long flickering superhighway of every movement I was awed to think that anyone would snap out of the air and hold onto when I would barely place it as my own image. It knocked me flat, how closely Spock had always paid attention.

I saw myself as the Murder newcomer standing at the front of the meeting room while Junior rattled off the introduction, my hand giving a laid-back gesture of hello to the boys and girls with a nearly arrogant lack of the nervousness that usually sits on the shoulders of new transfers, and Spock had been instilled with an immediate mix of sharp annoyance and magnetic curiosity. He spent the next couple weeks systematically assigning me to one stereotype after the other and practically lusting over the mystery of it when I proved each and every one not quite there. One morning he made a sarcastic quip in response to something the superintendent said, an insult that went right over his and everyone's head, but then he spotted me hiding my laugh behind my hand a couple chairs up and over.

We were friends before he was prepared to perceive it, becoming partners when I talked him into a joint investigation on a solo fly he was doing involving an elderly man found just a few blocks away from headquarters and the rest of it became history, long nights of Spock having the easy excuse of work and responsibility to stay in my company longer and longer, his nights alone in his apartment seeming somehow too quiet, the more he got used to me. He was more than used to me by the end of year one, something hopped-up and accustomed to the best kind of longing affixed deep into his bones. One day I absent-mindedly touched his arm and he warned me why I might not want to. Another day he accidentally touched me and I told him I really didn't mind, not knowing at the time how firmly I was slipping my hand under his skin, having no idea as months went on that I was the only person he ever really felt. Here I've always said that I don't see myself as very distinctive and I was seeing Jim Kirk, the person who dented right into Spock's life and every sense of him like a color he'd never seen before, shameless and open and easy and with eyes that wouldn't quit being so blue, even when they were Will's:

That wounded undercurrent came out of a long rumbling Doppler Effect into a painful howl—Spock shakily pushing Will's eyelids closed and then stuttering back to lean against the brick, feeling almost unable to stand. The odd nightmares that came after, including the one where he had photos of me and my clothes were cluttering his apartment and he knew that there was something important to do with them but could not remember who I was. Churning visions of wind growling through the trees, and this: Spock standing against a tree trunk when he hears the soft-footed approach behind him, feels a gentle hand on his shoulder and looks up to see her, her face sweet and slightly pained.

 _Spock. I'm sorry about what I said._ She leans down, squeezes his shoulders between her hands. _Please, let's not argue anymore. We're supposed to be having a nice time._

Spock considering some of her words with forced indifference, but saying, _I know, Mother._

 _I just don't want you to think that there's anything I want you to be except yourself. When I say those things about your father..._ A sad hesitation. _It's not that I don't want you to be like your father. I just hope that you pay more attention to what he does than to what he says sometimes._

Spock's eyes follow an insect across the twigs on the ground. _I do not know what you mean by that._

 _That's alright_ , she says, and runs her hand down his cheek. _I think you will someday. Did you want to walk back soon?_

 _...Do you hear that?_ Spock is asking.

She blinks. _Hear what?_

 _The birds._ Spock says, _Why don't we hear any birds?_

 _The birds have gone to sleep, my dear._

 _But I was studying the calls. There's a bird with a long call that's out at dusk._ Spock and his mother look around, hearing nothing. _It isn't supposed to be quiet. I don't hear any animals at all._

 _Honey, it's nothing to be frightened about._ She takes his hand.

 _What would I be frightened of?_ Her hand feels cold, though, and instead of resisting the contact he holds it in a light squeeze.

He'd banged right up in his bed; he'd banged a few knocks on the door before Bones came answering, looking dismayed and concerned.

 _You know I'm not a psychologist, and even if I was, you'd probably call me a lousy one, but if you need my opinion? I haven't got a clue. You're saying you're not even positive whether you were fully asleep?_ Bones held up a bourbon bottle with a dubious expression, decided to fill up Spock a tall glass of water.

 _There were also..._ He got a weird, seemingly pitying look from Bones, who wasn't used to seeing him stammer like this, like he felt the idea was absurd. _There were things that did not make sense, as if...it was not a memory but perhaps possibly a dream about a memory...Generally I dream very little, with the exception of recently._

Bones was pouring himself the bourbon. _Well. It's extremely rare—probably even more rare for Vulcans since I'm assuming they tried to pick the memories back out with telepathy, right?—to retrieve any memories long after trauma-induced amnesia, I'm sure you know that. But if you're asking me if some of it could have been real, I wouldn't say that it's impossible._

Spock gulped down some of the water and confirmed, _Possible, but substantially unlikely._

Bones leaned his elbows on the bar in his kitchen. _Thing is, I can't help wondering...Have you been dwelling on this a lot more since, you know...the body was found? Having crazier dreams?_

Spock considered some over-elaborating answer, but then settled on slowly nodding.

 _It makes me wonder. Cause that must have been the only other emotional blow you've ever experienced that would compare to what happened when you were a kid...Right?_

For a while, neither of them said anything. Spock then said, _I would appreciate if you would not inform him I spoke to you._

 _Fine, but why?_

 __Spock neglected to explain, and Bones sighed.

 _You know that he's under right now?_

 _The rumors have been cryptic, as undercover is handled very discretely_ , Spock said sullenly, _but when I was advised under confidentiality that it would be best for me to avoid certain areas of the city for a time, I suspected...Are you worried that he is going to do something reckless?_

When Spock looked over at Bones, his expression looked heavy. _Yeah. I am._

After a moment Spock said, _I am too._

After that, his dreams were different, bristling with a warmth that seemed to blossom over several nights into a soft slow yawn of heat, heat, wet, blue eyes and bright emotion pouring through skin, my voice moaning his name. Back upstairs it kicked me headlong into ripping waves of pleasure, throwing my senses out flying until my head fell back onto a gripped tangle of blanket. " _God_ ," I grunted out, still shivering through quakes of it as he moved in me and moved in me harder, gasping unintelligible mutters of release into my neck.

We collapsed around each other, he held me close, and neither of us moved for a long, long time.

 

 

A few hours later I woke next to him in his bed, rolling into wrapping my arms around him automatically. "Hey, you," I mumbled.

"Are you hungry?" he asked, though I didn't get the idea he would have been eager to do anything about it.

"Not enough to move," I said in a tired sigh.

He turned so that his hips were pushed into mine, stroking a hand down my face and neck and then drawing along my collarbone.

After I was a little more awake I asked, "So that thing I saw, with your mom...You don't know if you were dreaming or remembering that?"

"That would be precisely the question," he said wanly. "I will likely never know. What I must accept is that, were my mind to suddenly have the mercy to leave me with that last piece of my past, and only that one memory...it may have been a kind thing for it to do."

"Have you ever wondered," I slowly asked, the question feeling fragile with hesitance, "if you would have actually wanted to forget whatever it was, if you had the choice? Would you have locked it away intentionally?"

"You mean much like what Danek and the others did."

For a solemn moment, I looked down and didn't meet his eyes. He squeezed his hand over mine.

"As illogical as it is, I find the temptation to compare our lives to theirs, or mine to his, is somewhat ubiquitous." His eyes traveled thoughtfully somewhere along the mess of my tousled hair. "I have wondered for most of my life, and being exposed to what the residents did only complicates the question. It grieves me to even attempt to imagine such hardship that would make me wish to forget my own existence so fully...And to imagine if it were my life; if I was to forget you..."

My eyelash tickled against the blanket that was under my cheek and my response was small with drowsiness, but immediate. "I don't really believe in miracles or anything...but I'm pretty sure I'd find you again."

Spock's fingers reached up again and found the pendant which I seemed to continuously forget I was still wearing, brushing along the cord and then shifting his head down to kiss along my bones. He quietly said, "You may hold on to this for me," before he started to kiss his way farther down my body, slow and unveiling.

By the time he finally got up out of bed to go make us some dinner, it was as if I'd always been there smiling lazily after him, as if I'd never left.


	12. Epilogue

"Tell me again," I said, trying to snap a PADD out of Spock's hand, "who is this guy they're questioning tomorrow?"

"Need I remind you this is confidential information?"

A gave him a simpering look over my coffee. We were at our favorite little bookstore tea shop next to the lake beach close to the villages, Spock was still giving a fraction of his attention to cleaning up a spill on the table that had been my fault, and I was being snoopy. With a small sigh, he relented.

"We have found a man who specializes in theft of genetic material, which would usually be done for the purpose of more common unethical behavior: employers using illegitimate means of screening potential employees and such. But the possibility that he may have assisted the harvester involved with Operation Amnesia is worth looking into." He made an expression of distaste, picking up another napkin to wipe at his hands. "I'm assuming you know about the surveillance recording that was produced?"

"Somebody thought they recognized Ken as a frequent customer and neither Sulu nor Ken remembers ever going there?"

"If this is accurate recognition and does not cover the brief time frame after the five escaped from captivity, the possibility is somewhat fascinating," he added, "that they would have been permitted to leave the facility..."

"It would be easy enough to keep them under control," I pondered with a shrug. "Keep a rule that one of them always has to stay behind, as leverage for 'good behavior'? It would explain a lot about them apparently being allowed to socialize with each other so much, depending on what the hell kind of 'facility' we're looking at..."

"Your imagination continues to impress and disturb me," Spock said with a raising eyebrow. I smirked.

We got on to talking about something more mundane—the regular controversy of the grocery shopping, most likely—when she appeared around the corner of one of the bookshelves in a way that made me want to pretend I hadn't noticed until it was clear she was walking right up to our table.

Spock was interrupted mid-sentence as she stopped in front of us, looking a bit like she didn't know which of us she wanted to look at less.

My eyes still narrowed nervously, I said, "Uhura?"

She gave me a stiff little smile and said, "Guess again."

We took a walk around the block outside, our hands shoved into our pockets and avoiding too much eye contact with one another. I wanted to make some conversationally amazed comment about running into her like this, but I felt like I remembered this was a frequent spot for her and the rest. It was odd to see that she was here alone, but I would have expected it less of any of the others. Besides, I had no idea how a comment like that would be received.

I settled for asking, even if it wasn't my damn business, "How's everyone doing?" Toni was wearing a new coat that made me think of blueberries. She always did wear things in colors you wanted to smell or take a bite out of; I don't know if I would have pictured her looking more like she was going to a funeral, but it was strangely consoling that she looked so recognizable.

"We're holding up," she said easily enough. "We had to move to a new house, but it's a real beauty. Danek graduated early and he's got this serious researching job already. We're thanking fuck for the money, with the baby on the way."

I looked over at her, startled. "Wow. I mean...congra—?"

"Shit." She wasn't sure if she'd wanted to mention it. "It's not me, it's Gaila. She's having a boy. You can say congratulations, yeah, we're all over the moon about it."

I didn't know what to say. It made me, I decided, extremely happy, but I didn't know if I should say so.

She let out an agitated noise and was no longer looking at me. "Fuck, this is so strange. I don't know if I want to catch up with you like we've had old times together or smack you till you bleed. This whole thing still does my head in."

She took out her cigarette (I'd more or less given it up a while back, but I wished I had a smoke right then) and all I could do was grimace weakly. "I understand."

After a few drags she admitted, "I've been following you two since the pier. You know..." With that she indicated with her head over the long veranda that lined up the shops, down along the coastline.

It gave me a tingling start, thinking about what that meant. My eyes and mind were tracing along the whole edge of the beach where Spock and I had walked for a good half hour. Somewhere along I'd picked up a flat rock and tried to skip it along the water, provoking a light-hearted physics lecture from Spock so that I had to shut him up by bumping my shoulder into him and then, after the tiny smile on his face, clutch my arm through his. We'd walked like that the rest of the way.

"My first thought when I saw the two of you was that maybe, after the whole mess was over, you sought him out for some reason and..." Toni was squinting over the horizon. "I thought that there was something kind of sick about that. But then, I kept watching you...Have you known him a long time?"

I nodded. "A few years."

An overwhelmed little noise went through her. "Of all the mindfuckery, _fuck_...I guess that made the job easier, huh?"

"No," I said, sure. "Harder. Much harder."

She looked at me askance as if she wasn't sure whether she was curious.

"It made it hard to know what to expect," I explained. "And anyway, Spock and I weren't...we weren't together through all that. We weren't even speaking."

Her response was bitter and fast. "So you got some nice soul-searching done on the way? How lovely for you."

"That isn't what I meant."

"Doesn't make it not true."

"It's complicated, but...maybe you're right, even if it's not in the way you think?...I'm sorry." I shrugged. "There's nothing I can say. I was just doing my job."

Something made her cringe, almost like she pitied me. "The thing that makes me keep thinking about it, though, is that I don't think I believe it was that simple for you. Am I stupid for thinking that? But Danek, even though he doesn't say it, he seems to think so. He's not exactly defensive of you, but he gets weird and he doesn't really let us talk about it around him. Sometimes the cops were all really cold to us, and I kept thinking for some reason that you were different, but I didn't have much of a reason to think that...You never told Danek that you knew Spock," she suddenly remarked.

I shook my head, taking a few seconds to think of what to say. "What would it have meant to him if I did?"

"I don't know," she said, incredulous at the idea and almost laughing a bit. "But that's kind of my point. One time Danek said to me that if he really thinks about it, it was the questions you didn't ask him that made him think he might be able to at least trust you, to think of us as our own people, I mean. Not that anyone could blame you for thinking some things, but at least you didn't ask. I've been talking to Uhura, you know, just like writing a couple letters and...she told me she didn't know you very well, but also that the two of you were friends, which I didn't really get, but..."

I couldn't help laughing. "She said that?"

"She told me you left undercover a long time ago, and that you're a good detective and that you have a big heart. So..." In a different life, she might have elbowed me along with the smart little smirk, we might have had this exact type of conversation with slightly more warmth. "How big is it?"

I smiled, but there was a seriousness that came back in the air before I said anything. "I worry about all of you."

"We'd rather you didn't," she said, less harshly than she could have. "Things were rough...with the police and the surveillance and the goddamn shrinks, it was awful for a while, but you know, of course it was. But sometimes, it's not even like I've fallen back into believing the things I know now are wrong, but...I forget. Maybe I'm not normal, but I forget that I'm not. Not when I'm with the others."

We'd stopped walking now that we'd come back around, and naturally pivoted to face each other, but my eyes were somewhere at her lapels and my shoulders were stiffened against the slight cold.

Out of nothing, Toni offered in a grainy voice, "Danek says that it almost seems like we had to lose him. Because if we'd been discovered any other way, if people hadn't seen us at our worst like that, we might have been treated a lot differently. And maybe even so we could understand for ourselves that we're...well, you know."

"Human."

"It's hard for me to think of it that way. Of course Danek doesn't want to believe that it needed to happen and he's the one who said it. But maybe Will would have at least thought it needed to be said." She shrugged a bit sadly, and looked around. "Well, I need to get back."

I realized, when she glanced right into my eyes, it was the most directly she'd looked at me the whole time, like she'd been afraid to. There was something sharply wounded that flashed through her face; she bit her lip and then it was gone.

I am aware that in some fairness, the residents do have a couple things to thank me for, but I'm beyond glad that when it seemed like she might have been about to, she didn't. I'm not into thinking contractually, but the best I can do with myself over the whole thing is believe that in the end, we were even, and there was nothing to be said. She reached out her mittened hand and said, "Good luck, Detective."

I took it with a good little clutch, saying, "Same to you."

For a few moments I almost stood there and continued to watch her figure ebbing away down the veranda, boots crunching through the occasional snow on the wooden deck and standing taller than she seemed to stand before; I almost stayed to watch until the final moment when she disappeared around the corner.

But it was getting cold, so I straightened myself up and turned to start walking in the opposite direction, to where I knew Spock would be waiting for me back at the car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic was written for round 3 of [star trek big bang](http://startrekbigbang.livejournal.com/). There is some wonderful art for it by mal-feasant [here](http://mal-feasant.livejournal.com/6498.html). I also put together a [playlist](http://ninety6tears.livejournal.com/115372.html#cutid1) for it at the master post.


End file.
